(London) The book Kairosby Berlin writer Jenny Erpenbeck, won the International Booker Prize on Tuesday evening for the best novel translated into English, which rewards a German author for the first time.
The novel traces the destructive romantic relationship between a young woman and an older man in 1980s East Berlin, against a backdrop of the crushed idealism of the former East Germany.
“The fall of the Berlin Wall “is an idea of liberation,” responded Jenny Erpenbeck, quoted in a press release. “And what interested me is that this liberation is not the only thing that can be told in such a story,” she added, “there are years before and years after.”
Presented at the Tate Modern in London, the prize of 50,000 pounds sterling (86,750 Canadian dollars) is shared between the author and her translator Michael Hofman, the first man to be thus distinguished since 2016, when the award took its form current.
The president of the jury, Eleanor Watchel, praised a “luminous prose” in which the writer evokes “the complexity of a relationship between a young student and an older writer, following the daily tensions and reversals which mark their intimacy “.
Last year, the International Booker Prize was awarded to the Bulgarian Georgi Gospodinov for Time Shelterwhich takes the reader to a past clinic for Alzheimer’s patients that is overrun by people wanting to escape the horrors of modern life.