Jenny Erpenbeck has become the first German author to win the International Booker Prize. Her novel “Kairos,” translated from German by Michael Hofmann, has won this prestigious award.
Set against the backdrop of 1986 Berlin, “Kairos” narrates a tumultuous love story between a young woman and an older, married man she meets on a bus. Their intense and passionate affair unravels when she spends a night with someone else, leading to emotional fractures that mirror the collapse of East Germany.
Erpenbeck described “Kairos” as “a private story of a big love and its decay, but it’s also a story of the dissolution of a whole political system. Simply put: How can something that seems right in the beginning, turn into something wrong?”
The book was selected from a shortlist of six books in six languages (Dutch, German, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish) representing six countries (Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, South Korea, and Sweden) and three continents (Asia, Europe, and South America).
In her speech, Erpenbeck shared, “I come from a family of writers. My grandparents were writers, my father wrote fiction, and my mum was a translator from Arabic to German. She translated a Nobel Prize Winner. There was much writing in my family on all sides, and now I’m standing here, and I’m very honoured.”
Michael Hofmann, the first male translator to win the award, remarked, “It’s funny being the back half of a pantomime horse, or the brakeman on a bobsleigh team, but there is something exhilarating about translating, doing something in a big zigzag as quickly and finely as you can.”
The award ceremony took place at London’s Tate Modern, with Eleanor Wachtel, Chair of the 2024 judges, announcing the £50,000 prize, which is split equally between the author and translator.
