International Booker Prize
German author Jenny Erpenbeck wins the award
Jenny Erpenbeck can be happy about the “International Booker Prize”.
© imago/Uwe Meinhold
Jenny Erpenbeck was the first German author to win the “International Booker Prize”. Translator Michael Hofmann is also celebrated.
Jenny Erpenbeck (57) and Michael Hofmann have won the “International Booker Prize” 2024 for Erpenbeck’s “personal and political” novel “Kairos”, which was translated by Hofmann. Erpenbeck is the first German female writer to receive the prize, while Hofmann is the first male translator to win. The prize money of 50,000 pounds (around 58,500 euros) will be divided equally between the two, say the organizers.
The International Booker Prize is awarded annually for the best work of fiction translated into English and published in Great Britain or Ireland.
Destructive affair at the center of the novel
Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel “Kairos” is about a destructive affair between a young woman and an older man in East Berlin in the 1980s, against the backdrop of the fall of the GDR and the subsequent upheaval. The novel raises “complex questions about freedom, loyalty, love and power,” according to the description of the work on the website of the important British literary prize.
The novel is about a tormented love affair and “the entanglement of personal and national changes,” said the jury chairwoman, the Canadian writer Eleanor Wachtel (77), according to the British newspaper “The Guradian” about the book.
Author Jenny Erpenbeck has received numerous awards
The author and director Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. In 1999 her novella “The Story of the Old Child” was published, which was followed by novels, stories and plays. The writer has already been honored with numerous awards, including the Thomas Mann Prize, the Uwe Johnson Prize, the Hans Fallada Prize and the Federal Cross of Merit with Ribbon.