Jenny Erpenbeck

Erpenbeck grew up in East Berlin in a family of writers, trained first as a bookbinder, then studied musical theater direction and worked for years as an opera director, staging productions across German houses. She was in her early twenties when the Wall fell, and the rupture (a whole state and childhood dissolving overnight) became her recurring subject, worked out in short, formally exacting novels like Visitation, which follows a single lakeside house through a century of German history.

Go, Went, Gone (2015) turned outward, tracing a retired classics professor's growing involvement with African refugees in reunified Berlin. Kairos (2021), a destructive love affair shadowing the GDR's final years, won the International Booker Prize in 2024, translated by Michael Hofmann: the first German-language novel to take the award.