Jenny Erpenbeck

About

Jenny Erpenbeck is an acclaimed German novelist, playwright and opera director, born in East Berlin in 1967. She grew up in a family with a strong literary heritage: her grandfather was the physicist and philosopher Fritz Erpenbeck, and her grandmother was the writer Hedda Zinner. Before becoming a full-time writer, Erpenbeck trained as a bookbinder, worked as a theatre props manager and studied musical theatre direction. She subsequently built a successful career as an opera director before publishing her debut novella, The Old Child, in 1999. Her fiction frequently explores memory, displacement, political change and the ways history shapes individual lives. Her notable works include Visitation (2008), The End of Days (2012) and Go, Went, Gone (2015), a novel examining the experiences of African refugees in contemporary Germany. Erpenbeck received the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2015 for The End of Days. In 2024, she won the International Booker Prize for Kairos, translated from German by Michael Hofmann. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages and is widely recognised for its lyrical precision, philosophical depth and exploration of the relationship between private experience and historical upheaval.