German · b. 1967
Jenny Erpenbeck won the 2024 International Booker Prize for "Kairos," a novel about an affair in 1980s East Berlin that parallels the GDR's decline. The German author writes compressed, elliptical fiction that examines German history through individual lives. "Go, Went, Gone" addressed the refugee crisis; her earlier work traced a single house across the twentieth century. Erpenbeck finds in small stories the shape of historical catastrophe.