Author Jenny Erpenbeck wins International Booker Prize for 'Kairos'
German author Jenny Erpenbeck has won this year's International Booker Prize for her novel 'Kairos', translated into English by Michael Hofmann, the organisation announced today.
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Cultura Literatura
At the award ceremony in London, Erpenbeck said she was "really surprised" to have been chosen and admitted she hadn't prepared a speech.
Jenny Erpenbeck became the first German to win the prize, while Michael Hofmann is the first male recipient since the award, founded in 2005, was expanded to include translators in 2016. The two will split the £50,000 prize money (58,500 euros).
The book, by an author with only one title published in Portugal ('Eu vou, tu vais, ele vai', by Relógio d'Água, in 2018), "follows the destructive affair between a young woman and an older man in 1980s East Berlin", crossing the personal and the political, as the two lovers "seem to embody the crushed idealism of East Germany, both clinging to the past long after they know they should move on", according to the synopsis released by the award organisation.
In addition to the winning work, the finalists for this edition of the prize, which distinguishes a literary work translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland, were the Brazilian Itamar Vieira Júnior, with "Torto Arado", the Argentine Selva Almada, with "Not a River", the Korean Hwang Sok-yong, with the book "Mater 2-10", the Dutch Jente Posthuma, with the work "What I'd Rather Not Think About", and the Swedish Ia Genberg, with "The Details".
The selection was made from 149 applications (a record number) by a jury chaired by presenter Eleanor Wachtel and composed of editor and translator Aaron Robertson, writer Romesh Gunesekera, visual artist William Kentridge and poet Natalie Diaz.
Read Also: João Luís Barreto Guimarães wins prize with poems about anxiety (Portuguese version)
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