Jenny Erpenbeck Wins International Booker Prize for Kairos

Jenny Erpenbeck and Michael Hofmann have won the 2024 International Booker prize for Erpenbeck’s book novel Kairos.

Michael Hofmann has translated the book from German.

The £50,000 prize money will be split equally between the pair.

Kairos tells the story of a relationship set against the backdrop of the collapse of East Germany.

The novel is a “richly textured evocation of a tormented love affair, the entanglement of personal and national transformations”, said judging chair and broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel.

Hofmann’s translation “captures the eloquence and eccentricities of Erpenbeck’s writing, the rhythm of its run-on sentences, the expanse of her emotional vocabulary”, she added.

Erpenbeck said: “Thirty years have passed since the country in which I was born is gone, so I could dare to look back and take my time to carefully research what I lived through without really being aware of it.”

“I got this idea to make a collage of this love story and the historic story”, she added. It also gave her the opportunity to examine how things “meant to be true and great” and that had “utopian potential” could turn into “totally failed communication.”

Kairos is Jenny Erpenbeck’s fourth novel. Her second novel ‘The End of Days’ won the independent foreign fiction prize in 2015.

While Jenny Erpenbeck is the first German writer to win, Michael Hofmann is the first male translator to win the coveted international booker prize.