Jenny Erpenbeck is a German novelist, playwright, and opera director. She is best known for her novel The End of Days (2012), which won the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and for Kairos (2021), winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize. She is the first German author to receive the award.
Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin on 12 March 1967. Her parents were physicist and writer John Erpenbeck and Arabic translator Doris Kilias. Her grandparents, Fritz Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner, were also writers. Jenny attended an Advanced High School in Berlin, graduating in 1985, and trained as a bookbinder before working in theatre.
From 1988 to 1990, Erpenbeck studied theatre at Humboldt University, later continuing as a music theatre director at the Hanns Eisler Conservatory under the guidance of Ruth Berghaus, Heiner Müller, and Peter Konwitschny. She completed her studies in 1994 with a production of Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.
Her early directing career included work in Graz, where in 1997 she staged Erwartung and Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, alongside her own piece Cats Have Seven Lives. She later directed opera productions in Aachen, Berlin, and Nuremberg. At the same time, she began to write fiction, reflecting that “the end of the system that I knew, that I grew up in — this made me write.”
Her debut novella, Geschichte vom alten Kind (The Old Child), appeared in 1999. In 2001, she published the story collection Tand, the novella Wörterbuch (2004), and the novel Heimsuchung (2008), translated as Visitation.
In 2012, Jenny Erpenbeck published Aller Tage Abend (The End of Days), which was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in English translation. Her novel Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015), translated as Go, Went, Gone, was later selected as a New York Times Notable Book.
Kairos (2021) marked another milestone. Erpenbeck described it as “a private story of a big love and its decay, but it’s also a story of the dissolution of a whole political system.” She explained, “How can something that seems right in the beginning turn into something wrong? This transition interested me.” The English translation by Michael Hofmann won the 2024 International Booker Prize.
Her works have been translated into more than twenty languages. She has received the Solothurner Literaturpreis, the Joseph Breitbach Prize, the Thomas Mann Prize, and the Uwe Johnson Prize, among others. In 2017, Erpenbeck was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Jenny Erpenbeck lives in Berlin with her husband, conductor Wolfgang Bozic, and their son.
Photo credit: FB @JennyErpenbeckTranslated
