Jenny Erpenbeck and Michael Hofmann have gained the 2024 Worldwide Booker prize for Erpenbeck’s “private and political” novel Kairos, translated by Hofmann from German.
Erpenbeck is the primary German author to win, whereas Hofmann is the primary male translator to win. The £50,000 prize cash shall be break up equally between the pair.
Kairos tells the story of a relationship set in opposition to the collapse of East Germany. The novel is a “richly textured evocation of a tormented love affair, the entanglement of private and nationwide transformations”, stated judging chair and broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel.
Hofmann’s translation “captures the eloquence and eccentricities of Erpenbeck’s writing, the rhythm of its run-on sentences, the expanse of her emotional vocabulary”, she added.
Wachtel stated the judging determination was reached with “appreciable consensus”, and that the ultimate judging dialog took half an hour. “I used to be really shocked on the final unanimity … this was the e book that everybody turned to when it got here to the crunch.”
Kairos is Erpenbeck’s fourth novel. Her second, The Finish of Days, gained the Impartial overseas fiction prize in 2015, which was the precursor to the Worldwide Booker prize. Her third, Go, Went, Gone, was longlisted for the Worldwide Booker prize in 2018.
Hofmann has additionally gained the Impartial overseas fiction prize – in 1995, for his translation of his father Gert Hofmann’s novel, The Movie Explainer. He was a choose for the Worldwide Booker prize in 2018, the yr that Erpenbeck was beforehand longlisted.
“Kairos is likely one of the bleakest and most lovely novels I’ve ever learn,” wrote Natasha Walter in her Guardian assessment of the novel. “The darkish nature of [the] relationship finds expression in Erpenbeck’s characteristically unyielding model. The novel is written within the current tense, a way that may be flattening when utilized by lesser writers. In a chic translation by Michael Hofmann, right here it creates a claustrophobic depth.”
The opposite books shortlisted for the prize have been Not a River by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott; The Particulars by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson; Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae; What I’d Fairly Not Suppose About by Jente Posthuma, translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey; and Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated by Johnny Lorenz.
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Wachtel was joined on the judging panel by poet Natalie Diaz, novelist Romesh Gunesekera, visible artist William Kentridge, and author, editor and translator Aaron Robertson.
Earlier winners of the prize embrace Han Kang and translator Deborah Smith, Olga Tokarczuk and translator Jennifer Croft, and Lucas Rijneveld and translator Michele Hutchison. Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel gained the 2023 prize for Time Shelter.
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