Literary Birthday – 12 March – Jenny Erpenbeck

Happy Birthday, Jenny Erpenbeck, born 12 March 1967.

Jenny Erpenbeck Quotes

1. I write on a computer. As with every book, I wrote about ten or twelve beginnings to this book[Kairos], becoming increasingly more desperate. Then I decided on one, then felt desperate again. I numbered the chapters I had written until then, wrote the numbers on slips of paper, put these in a bowl, let my son choose the order of the chapters out of the bowl, then I saw that it wouldn’t work that way either. Then I wrote the prologue, feeling relieved for a while. After having written half of the book my process revealed that everything was different from how I thought it was. The book had its own life, it seemed, and I had to adjust to it, and that is what I tried. (The Booker Prize Q&A)
2. As a small child I was desperately waiting for the moment when I could read by myself, after having listened to so many stories read to me by my parents. From the moment I could make sense of letters on a page, you would always find me in some corner with a book in my lap. (The Booker Prize Q&A)
3. There are so many lives not only to discover but to dive into by reading – so called ‘other’ worlds that by turning page after page become familiar to you, since we all are human beings and live on one planet. (The Booker Prize Q&A)
4. I hope, at least, that the reader can understand the feeling that made you write exactly these words and sentences. What I try to do is to pass things that impressed me to the readers as they were. (Literary Hub)
5. Often writing is a kind of answer to physical or mental violence, contempt, arrogance. It’s a way to speak to the other side, to connect, to make people understand what we all have in common instead of hating each other. But what if the other side is not willing to listen or to read? Or if their problems are based on a situation that really cannot be solved just by words? (Literary Hub)
6. The world is full of possible futures, we’re surrounded by them all the time. Some become visible to us, some become our reality and some pass unseen. (Waterstones)
7. Language has rhythm, it can speed up or slow down, it can be bright or dark, it is a system of different voices interwoven with each other. (Waterstones)
8. I’m the one who makes the choice of what will and won’t make it into the book. The dictatorship of being an author! Every book is just a window into the world, it’s not the world itself. (Waterstones)

Jenny Erpenbeck is a German opera director, playwright, and award-winning novelist. Her works include The Old Child & Other Stories, The End of Days, The Book of Words, Visitation, Things That Disappear, and Kairos. She won the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The End of Days and the 2024 International Booker Prize for Kairos. Her most well-known work, Go, Went, Gone, was longlisted for The Man Booker International Prize in 2018. She has also the author of Not a Novel: Collected Writings and Reflections, which gathers together the best of her non-fiction. Her work is translated into over 30 languages.

Source for image: Heike Huslage-Koch, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jenny_Erpenbeck_Frankfurter_Buchmesse_2018.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: Literary Birthday Calendar