Jenny Erpenbeck

born March 12, 1967 in East Berlin

Jenny Erpenbeck is the daughter of the physicist, philosopher and writer John Erpenbeck and the Arabic translator Doris Kilias. Her grandparents are the authors Fritz Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner. In Berlin she attended an Advanced High School, graduating in 1985. She then completed a two year apprenticeship as a bookbinder before working at several theaters as props and wardrobe supervisor.

From 1988 to 1990 Erpenbeck studied theatre at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1990 she changed her studies to Music Theater Director at the Hanns Eisler Music Conservatory. After the successful completion of her studies in 1994, she spent some time at first as an assistant director at the opera house in Graz. After that, she directed in various opera houses in Germany and Austria. In the late 1990s Erpenbeck started a writing career in addition to her directing. She is author of narrative prose and plays. In March 2007, Erpenbeck took over a biweekly column by Nicole Krauss in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Selected Prizes & Awards

2001: Jury Prize at the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition in Klagenfurt
2001: Several residencies (Ledig Rowohlt House in New York, Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf)
2004: GEDOK literature prize
2006: Winner of the Scholarship Island Writers on Sylt
2008: Solothurner Literaturpreis
2008: Heimito von Doderer Literature Prize
2008: Hertha-Koenig-Literature Prize
2009: Award of the North LiteraTour
2010 Literature Prize of the Steel Foundation Eisenhüttenstadt

Works

Prose

Geschichte vom alten Kind. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 1999.
Katzen haben sieben Leben. Theaterstück. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 2000.
Tand. Erzählungen. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 2001.
Wörterbuch. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 2004.
Heimsuchung. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 2008.
Dinge, die verschwinden. Galiani, Berlin 2009.

Plays

Katzen haben sieben Leben. UA: 30. Januar 2000, Vereinigte Bühnen Graz; Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren
Leibesübungen für eine Sünderin. UA: 27. März 2003, Deutsches Theater Berlin; Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren

Translations

Jenny Erpenbeck's works have been translated into Danish, English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Arabic and Estonian.

English

The Old Child and Other Stories. trans. Susan Bernofsky. New York: New Directions; London: Portobello, 2005.
The Book of Words. trans. Susan Bernofsky. New York: New Directions; London: Portobello, 2007.
Visitation. trans. Susan Bernofsky. New York: New Directions; London: Portobello, 2010.

About the Translator

Translator. scholar, and author Susan Bernofsky specializes in modernist and contemporary German-language literature (Robert Walser, Yoko Tawada, Hermann Hesse). She is recipient of the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize, the 2009 Looren Translation Grant, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and has won multiple awards from the PEN Translation Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Cover Art

A sampling of cover images from different editions and translations:

Eichborn (GERM)	New Directions (ENG)	Portobello (ENG)
Albert Bonniers Förlag (SWED)	Destino (SPAN)	Actes Sud (FREN)
Avain (FINN)	Vangennep (DUTCH)	(KOREAN)
(HEBREW)	Geopoetika (SERBIAN)	Humanitas (ROMANIAN)

Selected Excerpts from Reviews and Interviews

If Visitation has a central theme, it appears to be that everything is temporary but that history will judge whether your part in the proceedings was morally sound. A Brandenburg lake house proves to be a memorable courtroom for this arbitration into the lives of others. -Christian House in the Independent

"When you’re from the East, when you’ve seen your country disappear, you understand how quickly things can change. It’s surrealistic," she says, gesturing toward the overstuffed velveteen sofas, the newly installed crystal light fixtures, the chicly dressed creatives and entrepreneurs. 'This is not real somehow. "Things change, and this will change, too." -Jenny Erpenbeck in an Inteview with Vogue

Erpenbeck's prose eschew[s] … conventional tactics, neatly sewn-up psychologies and film-friendly dialogue … We are shown no dramatic meetings, no fraught conversations, between the architect and the Jews he supplants; we only see him taking a swim and wiping himself dry with one of the towels that are still hanging in the bathing-house "before it could occur to his wife to wash them". He congratulates himself for having given the Jews the full half market-value set by the law, and for helping them escape persecution. "Strange towels," he reflects. "Cloth manufacturers, these Jews. Terrycloth. Top quality goods." Quotes like this, while they hint at the troubling finesse of Erpenbeck's touch, don't do justice to the true subtlety of her fiction. It's common for literary authors to give objectionable characters a veneer of decency for us to see through; that's not what Erpenbeck is aiming for. She immerses us so deeply in the worldview of each protagonist that we grow fond of them all, worry about the things that worry them, cease to see the things that they ignore. We want them all to hold on to their home. -Michel Faber in the Guardian