Author shares prize for Kairos, her novel about lovers in 1980s East Berlin, with its translator, Michael Hofmann
Erpenbeck’s novel follows a destructive affair between a young woman and an older man in 1980s east Berlin. Photograph: Craig Stennett/Getty. Erpenbeck is the first German writer, and Hofmann the first male translator, to win the award. They will share the £50,000 prize. The book’s victory, from a record 149 entries, was announced by Eleanor Wachtel, chair of this year’s judges, at a ceremony at Tate Modern, in London, on Tuesday evening.
Kairos is a “wonderful circumstantial story in which 10 years pre- and post-Mauerfall come into play”, Hofmann said, referring to the period on either side of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. “The book seems to me like a coin, which has a personal story – heads, as it were – on one side, and tails, the emblem of the state, on the other. It keeps being spun into the air, and it comes down heads, it comes down tails.
Erpenbeck, who was born in East Berlin in 1967, six years after the construction of the Berlin Wall began, said, “The fall of the wall is an idea of breaking free. And what interested me is that breaking free is not the only thing that can be told in such a story. There are years before and years after. It’s also about what follows the happy end.
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