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Jenny Erpenbeck and Michael Hofmann’s Kairos wins the £50k International Booker Prize for 2024
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann (Granta Books), has been announced as winner of the International Booker Prize 2024 on Tuesday (21st May). The author is the first German writer – and Hofmann the first male translator – to win the award, and the £50,000 prize will be split between them.
This is the second win for Granta Books from when the prize took its current form in 2016 (it won the prize in that year for The Vegetarian).
Similar to last year’s winner, Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel (W&N), Kairos is set in the period that preceded the fall of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe and during the times that followed. It tells the story of a young woman and an older man having a destructive affair in East Berlin.
The hardback and paperback editions of the book have sold 6,781 copies in the UK, for a value of £86,290, according to data from Nielsen BookScan.
Erpenbeck – who had been longlisted for the prize in 2018 – was named the winning author by Eleanor Wachtel, chair of the judges, at a ceremony sponsored by Maison Valentino, held at London’s Tate Modern, and hosted by academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari on Tuesday (21st May).
Wachtel revealed at an earlier press conference that “the final decision was reached with considerable consensus” this year. She said of Kairos: “It starts with love and passion, but it’s at least as much about power, art and culture.
“The self-absorption of the lovers, their descent into a destructive vortex, remains connected to the larger history of East Germany during this period, often meeting history at odd angles.”
Alongside Wachtel, the 2024 judging panel also included poet Natalie Diaz, Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Romesh Gunesekera, artist William Kentridge, and writer, editor and translator Aaron Robertson.
The winner was chosen from a shortlist of six books, which included Selva Almada’s Not a River, translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott (Charco Press), and Ia Genberg’s The Details, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson (Wildfire Books). The prize organisers have donated 500 sets of the shortlisted books to UK libraries via The Reading Agency.
“The judges have read 149 books, the largest number ever submitted for the International Booker Prize,” commented Fiammetta Rocco, the administrator of the International Booker Prize. “Their winner, after many months of deliberation, is a book about love and politics. About the fissures of history.”
The first public event with Erpenbeck and Hofmann will be at Foyles Charing Cross Road in London on Thursday 23rd May at 7pm, and the winners will be in conversation with Rocco. Another event will also be held at the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye, on Saturday 25th May, when International Booker Prize judge and novelist Gunesekera and Booker Prize Foundation chief executive Gaby Wood will be in conversation with the winners.
