Jenny Erpenbeck named first German to win International Booker Prize
Jenny Erpenbeck has become the first German author to win the International Booker Prize, a prestigious British literary award.
"I'm really surprised," she said as she collected the prize on Tuesday evening in London, adding that she had not even prepared a speech.
The 57-year-old from East Berlin won the award for her novel "Kairos," which tells the love story between a student and an older author in 1980s East Germany.
Erpenbeck and her translator Michael Hofmann will split the £50,000 ($63,600) prize.
She is widely recognized as one of the most important stars of German literature, and has received international acclaim for works such as "The End of Days" and "Go, Went, Gone." Her books have been translated into more than 30 languages.
Erpenbeck has been tipped as a potential future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Publishing house Penguin congratulated the author on Instagram, saying her victory was all the more impressive given the challenges German books face in breaking into the English-speaking market due to translation costs and the difficulty of translating German.
