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A novel by author Jenny Erpenbeck kairos He has been selected as the winner of this year's International Booker Prize.
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A novel by author Jenny Erpenbeck kairos He has been selected as the winner of this year's International Booker Prize.
Thomas Lawns/Getty Images
kairos'', a novel depicting a love story between a young woman and an older man set in Germany in the 1980s, won this year's International Booker Prize. This award is one of the most prestigious awards for novels translated into English.
Originally written in German by Jenny Erpenbeck, the book was translated by Michael Hofmann. The two will split the prize money of 50,000 British pounds (about $63,000) equally.
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At the center of Kairos is the relationship between 19-year-old Katerina and Hans, a married writer in his 50s. They have sex, take walks, and listen to music. But the relationship soon begins to turn violent and cruel. This sense of loss and disillusionment was linked to the political changes taking place in Germany at the time. Praising the novel, Fresh Air critic John Powers wrote, “Erpenbeck understands that a great love story must be more than just love.”
He continues: “Despite the fact that she records Katarina and Hans' romance in painful detail, their love becomes a metaphor for East Germany, a country that began with hopes for a brilliant future and ended in pettiness, condemnation, punishment, and failure. .”
![Cover of the novel Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck and translated by Michael Hofmann](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2024/05/21/erpenbeck_kairos_rgb_custom-322873af0ae239746ec78341c3e3250f193f2328.jpg?s=800&c=100&f=jpeg)
Erpenbeck was previously an opera director. Her first novel was published in 2008. The Old Child and the Book of Words The story of a child who has lost his memory. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for fiction. go, go, go. She is a highly acclaimed author who has earned glowing reviews and glowing profiles in NPR, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and critics often predict a Nobel Prize win in her future.
Translator Michael Hofmann is a poet, essayist and former judge of the International Booker Prize. Hoffmann is the first male translator to receive this award. He translated dozens of books from German to English, including authors such as Franz Kafka and Hans Fallada. A 2016 interview in The Guardian called him “perhaps the world's most influential German-to-English translator,” citing his ability to “revive the author's reputation in German.”
In a press release announcing the prize, this year's jury president Eleanor Watchel praised the way the novel used personal stories as a way to examine Germany's broader political machinations. She writes, “The lovers' self-absorption, their descent into a destructive vortex, are linked to the larger history of East Germany during this period, and often meet that history at strange angles.”
Other finalists for the 2024 International Booker Prize are: not a river Written by Selva Almada, translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott; crooked plow Written by Itamar Viera Junior, translated from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz; Crossbreeding 2-10 by Hwang Seok-yong (Korean translation of Kim So-ra-Russell and the Gifted Josephine Bae); What I don't want to think about Author: Jente Posthuma, translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey; and Detail Written by La Genberg, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson.
Author Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel won last year's International Booker Prize for this novel. Time Shelter.
This story was edited for radio and digital by Meghan Collins Sullivan.