Talk: Jenny Erpenbeck about her life, her work and the dimensions of German history
What is it like to be constantly reminded that you live on the poorer side of Germany and personify the other side of German history?
Author and director
Jenny Erpenbeck, born and raised in East-Berlin, addresses Germany’s history as well as the upheals of Europe‘s 20th century.
With her masterful new novel
'Go, went, gone' she explores the sometimes fraught and always complex relationship between a retired classics professor and a group of African asylum seekers in Berlin and turns her attention to one of the great moral challenges facing the European continent this century – mass human displacement and the refugee crisis. In her acclaimed sixth novel,
'The End of Days', the main character dies four times, living out several different destinies, each uniquely shaped by historical events in Germany, Austria and Russia.
Jenny Erpenbeck won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The New Yorker has praised her “classical restraint”, comparing her to JM Coetzee, VS Naipul and Teju Cole. Her fiction is published in 27 languages.
She joins
Melinda Harvey, who is known as a book critic and is a judge at the of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. She is also a Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University in Melbourne. This event is organized by the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne.
Jenny Erpenbeck's visit to Australia is supported by the Goethe-Institut.
This event is part of the series
Jenny Erpenbeck in Australia.
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