German author Jenny Erpenbeck wins International Booker Prize, jury chaired by Eleanor Wachtel
The annual award celebrates the best works of fiction that have been translated into English
German author Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann won the International Booker Prize for fiction for Kairos, the story of a tangled love affair during the final years of East Germany's existence.
The annual award celebrates the best works of fiction from around the world that have been translated into English and published in the U.K. or Ireland. The £50,000 ($87,003.50 Cdn) grand prize is divided equally between writer and translator.
Erpenbeck said she hoped the book would help readers learn there was more to life in the now-vanished Communist country than depicted in The Lives of Others, the Academy Award-winning 2006 film about pervasive state surveillance in the 1980s.
"The only thing that everybody knows is that they had a wall, they were terrorizing everyone with the Stasi, and that's it," she said. "That is not all there is."
The jury was chaired by Eleanor Wachtel, who hosted CBC Radio's Writers & Company for 33 years before retiring in June 2023. The show is currently airing as repeats on CBC Radio.
Wachtel said Erpenbeck's novel is "a richly textured evocation of a tormented love affair, the entanglement of personal and national transformations."
It's set in the dying days of the German Democratic Republic, leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Erpenbeck, 57, was born and raised in East Berlin, which was part of East Germany until the country disappeared with German reunification in 1990.
"Like the GDR, [the book] starts with optimism and trust, then unravels so badly," Wachtel said.
She said Hofmann's translation captures the "eloquence and eccentricities" of Erpenbeck's prose.
Erpenbeck is the first German winner of the International Booker Prize, and Hofmann is the first male translator to win since the prize launched in its current form in 2016.
Wachtel was joined on the jury by American poet Natalie Diaz, Sri Lankan novelist Romesh Gunesekera, South African visual artist William Kentridge and Italian writer and translator Aaron Robertson.
Books published in the U.K. or Ireland between May 1, 2023 and April 30, 2024 were eligible for this year's prize. Publishers submitted 149 books, translated from 32 languages, for consideration.
Last year's winner was Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel for the novel for Time Shelter, a darkly comic novel about the dangerous appeal of nostalgia. Winning the International Booker gave Time Shelter a large sales lift: according to the prize, 20,000 copies were sold in the U.K. in the first 10 days after it won.
-- With files from CBC Books
