Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos wins International Booker Prize

LONDON – Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, a novel about a torrid love affair in the final years of East Germany, won on May 21 the International Booker Prize, the renowned award for fiction translated into English.

German writer Erpenbeck, 57, shared the prize of £50,000 (S$85,600) with German poet-translator Michael Hofmann, 66, who translated the book into English.

After receiving the prize during a ceremony at the Tate Modern art museum in London, the pair seemed lost for words.

Erpenbeck thanked her family, and Hofmann thanked Erpenbeck. “I want to thank Jenny for her trust in me,” he said. “Er, that’s about the size of it.”

Canadian writer Eleanor Wachtel, chair of the judges, said in a news conference that Kairos was more than a simple evocation of a romance. The “self-absorption of the lovers” – a student and a 50something novelist – and “their descent into a destructive vortex” tracks the history of East Germany before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, she added.

Like that country, Wachtel said, the couple’s relationship “starts with optimism and trust, then unravels so badly”.

“What makes Kairos so unusual is that it’s both beautiful and uncomfortable, personal and political, psychological and very moving,” she said. The judging panel deliberated for half an hour before deciding to give Kairos the prize.

Kairos beat five other shortlisted titles, including Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About, translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey, about a woman grieving her twin brother; and Hwang Sok-yong’s Mater 2-10, translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae, which traces North and South Korean history through a family of railway workers.

After its publication in English in 2023, some reviewers praised Kairos as the latest novel to suggest Erpenbeck could be a future winner of the Nobel Prize in literature.

American journalist Dwight Garner, in The New York Times, said Erpenbeck was “among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have”.

“Kairos,” he added, was so moving, it had “a subterranean force”. “I don’t generally read the books I review twice,” he said, “but this one, I did.”

Established in 2005, the International Booker Prize is separate from the Booker Prize, which recognises fiction written in English. Originally awarded for a writer’s entire body of work, the international prize in 2016 became an annual award for the best novel translated into English.

Past winners have included Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith, in 2016; and Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft, in 2018.

Erpenbeck is the first German novelist to win the award, while Hofmann is the first male translator to receive the honour.

Erpenbeck grew up in Berlin in what was then the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, and the country has provided either a setting or context for much of her fiction, including 2017’s Go, Went, Gone, about a professor befriending a group of African refugees in present-day Berlin.

In a recent interview with the Times, she said the tumult around the Berlin Wall’s collapse led to her becoming a writer, as she grappled with what it meant to lose “the system that I knew, that I grew up in”.

Stories about the fall of the Berlin Wall focus on the idea of freedom, Erpenbeck said in a recent interview for the Booker Prize’s website, but that was not the only story that could be told.

Kairos, she added, was “also about what follows the happy end”. NYTIMES