Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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The poet Michael Hofmann’s awards for translation include the PEN Translation Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Schlegel-Tieck Prize, and most recently, the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation. More about this author >
Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. She has written The Old Child & Other Stories, The End of Days, The Book of Words, and Visitation. More about this author >
Filed in the following archives
Translated from the German
From the publisher:
Kairos―an unforgettably compelling masterpiece―tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears.
