Join us in the Engagement Lab for a conversation and Q & A with acclaimed German author and opera director Jenny Erpenbeck, as she discusses her new novel Go, Went, Gone, the story of a retired Berlin classics professor who becomes embroiled in the fate of a group of African refugees. Go, Went, Gone won the 2016 Thomas Mann Prize and is newly published in English with a translation by Susan Bernofsky. *Please note that this is a German language event.
Jenny Erpenbeck is a German opera director and writer. Born in East Berlin in 1967, her work has been translated into 17 languages. Most recently, her novel The End of Days won the 2014 Hans Fallada Prize and the 2015 Independent Foreign Prize. Go, Went, Gone, the English translation of which Erpenbeck is presenting at the festival, won the Strega European Prize, the annual award given to a novel in Italian translation by a European author who has received national recognition in their home country.
Go, Went, Gone is the new novel by Jenny Erpenbeck.
Richard is a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns into compassion and an inner transformation as he visits their shelter, interviews them and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates. Go, Went, Gone, Erpenbeck’s masterful new novel, is a scathing indictment of Western policy toward the European refugee crisis.
Jenny Erpenbeck is a guest of the Goethe-Institut.
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