Described by Michel Faber as ‘one of the finest, most exciting authors alive’, but not yet well known to English readers, German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck has won this year’s Independent foreign fiction prize for The End of Days. Although the award has previously been given posthumously to both WG Sebald and Gert Hofmann, Erpenbeck is the first living German author to receive the honour. She shares the £10,000 purse with her translator Susan Bernofsky.
Erpenbeck saw off shortlist competition from Japanese bestseller Haruki Murakami, Belgium’s Erwin Mortier, fellow German Daniel Kehlmann, Colombian Tomás González and Juan Tomás Ávila, from Equatorial Guinea.
The End of Days is a bleak meditation on the possible lives of a girl born in Austro-Hungary at the beginning of the 20th century. In one of the alternative destinies Erpenback sets out, she meets an almost immediate end in a cot death. Her bereft mother is driven to prostitution, while her father flees to a desperately insecure life as an emigrant to America. In another version of her life, she grows up through the rise of fascism, famine in Vienna and culminating in her suicide. In a third incarnation she sees out the traumas of the century, living to watch the fall of the Berlin Wall, but still facing a bleak conclusion to her much-troubled life.
Despite its gruelling subject matter, Independent columnist and longtime prize judge Boyd Tonkin said: “This is a novel to enjoy, to cherish and to revisit many times. Into its brief span, Erpenback packs a century of upheaval, always rooted in the chances and choices of one woman’s life.”
The other four judges, who chose Erpenbeck from 111 titles from 28 source languages, were: Cristina Fuentes La Roche, director of Hay festival Americas; translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones; senior lecturer in translation at the University of Exeter Richard Mansell; and novelist Helen Oyeyemi.
This is the 25th year for the IFFP, whose £10,000 prize is divided between authors and their translators.
Last year’s prize was won by Iraqi novelist Hassan Blasim and translator Jonathan Wright for The Iraqi Christ. Previous winners include Orhan Pamuk and Per Petterson.
