‘Beautiful and uncomfortable, personal and political.’ Eleanor Wachtel, Chair of Judges 

Congratulations to Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann on winning the International Booker Prize for Kairos, published by Granta Books
 

‘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.’ – Jenny Erpenbeck
 

‘It’s a wonderfully circumstantial story in which the ten years pre- and post-Mauerfall come into play. 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.’ – Michael Hofmann