“I like to surprise people. Perhaps even shock my readership.”
We met German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize, for a very personal conversation about reading, writing, and growing up in first a divided and then a reunified Germany.
“I would love to enter the worlds of others. And I always liked to become someone else.”
”I think in language, the sound and the thinking, the music and the writing, come together. So, the language is always, even if you read silently, something that you imagine as a sound.”
“I like to tell a story in the way in which I use the language to give it a rhythm, to slow down, to speed up, to give a feeling of hesitating. Also, the sound of the voids is interesting. What interests me most is to write something in a way so that the silence between two passages, two words, is to be heard. Language is also a way to produce silence. Like a cliff. You give the reader a cliff to look into the abyss.”
Jenny Erpenbeck (b. 1967 in East Berlin) is an opera director, playwright, and award-winning novelist. She first trained as a bookbinder, then worked as a theatre props manager before studying musical theatre direction and enjoying a successful career as an opera director from the late 1990s.
She published her debut novella, Geschichte vom alten Kind, in 1999. Susan Bernofsky’s English translation, The Old Child, was published in 2005. Erpenbeck’s other translated works include The Book of Words (2008), Visitation (2010), and The End of Days (2014, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), and Go, Went, Gone (2017, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2018), as well as Not a Novel: Collected Writings and Reflections (2020).
Her work has been translated into over 30 languages. In 2019, her novel Visitation was named one of the 100 best books of the 21st century by the Guardian. In the United States, her novel Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann, was longlisted for 2023’s National Book Award for Translated Literature. In May 2024, Kairos won the International Booker Prize.
Jenny Erpenbeck was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in October 2024. The conversation took place at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark.
Camera: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Edit: Nanna Dahm
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026
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