‘W hat is a ‘no-brainer’?” the German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck asks translator Michael Hofmann. It is the morning after they have jointly been awarded the International Booker prize , and Hofmann has just used the expression to describe the judges’ decision to award this year’s prize to Erpenbeck’s latest novel Kairos, which Hofmann translated. But the novel wasn’t such a no-brainer back home, where, despite Erpenbeck being one of Germany’s most celebrated novelists, Kairos didn’t appear on the shortlists of either of the country’s most prestigious literary prizes.
Now Erpenbeck has become the first German author to win the International Booker since it was established nearly a decade ago, putting the German publishing world into a bit of a spin. “They are kind of panicking,” she laughs. The 57-year-old has written only four novels, beginning with her acclaimed debut Visitation in 2010 (all have been translated into English).
Yet her name routinely comes up around the time of the Nobel, and the New York Times recently described her as “among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have”. Her second novel, The End of Days , about a Jewish woman born in Galicia in 1900, won the Independent foreign fiction prize in 2015. Her third, Go, Went, Gone , which tells the stories of a group of African refugees in Berlin, was longlisted for the International Booker in 2017.
Her work also includes short stories, plays and nonfiction. Hofmann is simil.
