Profile pre-empts 'authoritative and compelling' new take on Kafka for centenary

Profile has landed Karolina Watroba’s Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka, securing the title in a pre-empt to publish on the centenary of the writer’s death in 2024.

Cecily Gayford, publishing director, obtained world all language rights from Chris Wellbelove at Aitken Alexander.

Metamorphoses is a non-chronological journey through Kafka’s life, combining literary scholarship with the responses of his readers through time. 

"In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death of tuberculosis at the age of 41, readers all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka—perhaps revisiting a favourite, or encountering Kafka for the first time," the synopsis reads. "Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books filled with mysterious courts and monstrous insects. But who, exactly, was Franz Kafka?

"Dr Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a Fellow of All Souls College Oxford, will tell Kafka’s story beyond the boundaries of language, time and space, travelling from the Prague of Kafka’s birth to the contemporary writers in East Asia whose award-winning novels are in part homages to the great man himself."

Watroba is a research fellow at All Souls, where she works on modern literature and film across eight European languages and beyond, with a focus on German, English, and Polish. This is her first trade book.

"Metamorphoses is a story of Kafka told through the stories of his readers around the world," she said. "In my academic work I show what we can learn about books from readers who encounter them in their everyday lives rather than a university classroom so I’m very excited that I now get to translate this research for a wider audience. This will be my first trade book and I couldn’t have imagined a better home for it than Profile."

Gayford added: "I am beyond delighted to be working with Karolina—a real star in the making—on her imaginative, authoritative, compelling Metamorphoses. Kafka is really the writer for our times and Metamorphoses is the biography he deserves—a portrait of an author who remains as elusive and fascinating as ever."