German author Jenny Erpenbeck wins International Booker Prize for tale of tangled love affair

LONDON — German author Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann won the International Booker Prize for fiction Tuesday for “Kairos,” the story of a tangled love affair during the final years of East Germany’s existence. Erpenbeck said she hoped the book would help readers learn there was more to life in the now-vanished Communist country than depicted in “The Lives of Others,” the Academy Award-winning 2006 film about pervasive state surveillance in the 1980s. Canadian broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel, who chaired the five-member judging panel, said Erpenbeck’s novel about the relationship between a student and an older writer is “a richly textured evocation of a tormented love affair, the entanglement of personal and national transformations.” It’s set in the dying days of the German Democratic Republic, leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Erpenbeck is the first German winner of the International Booker Prize, and Hofmann is the first male translator to win since the prize launched in its current form in 2016.