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Kairos, written by Jenny Erpenbeck and translated by Michael Hofmann, has won the 2024 International Booker Prize . Erpenbeck is the first German writer, and Hofmann the first male translator, to win the award. They will share the £50,000 (€58,500) prize.

The book’s victory, from a record 149 entries, was announced by Eleanor Wachtel, chair of this year’s judges, at a ceremony at Tate Modern, in London, on Tuesday evening. Erpenbeck’s novel follows a destructive affair between a young woman and an older man in 1980s East Berlin. It intertwines the personal and the political as the lovers seemingly embody the communist state’s crushed idealism, both holding on to the past long after they know they should move on.



Kairos is a “wonderful circumstantial story in which 10 years pre- and post-Mauerfall come into play”, Hofmann said, referring to the period on either side of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. “The book seems to me like a coin, which has a personal story – heads, as it were – on one side, and tails, the emblem of the state, on the other. It keeps being spun into the air, and it comes down heads, it comes down tails.

” [ Jenny Erpenbeck: ‘The Berlin Wall was there, but I didn’t feel as if I was in a cell. I also felt free’ ] Erpenbeck, who was born in East Berlin in 1967, six years after the construction of the Berlin Wall began, said, “The fall of the wall is an idea of breaking free. And what interested me is that breaking free is no.

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