About Jenny Erpenbeck
Jenny Erpenbeck (German pronunciation: [ˈdʒɛni ˈɛʁpm̩bɛk]; born 12 March 1967) is a German writer and opera director. She won the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The End of Days and the 2024 International Booker Prize for Kairos. == Life == Born in East Berlin, Erpenbeck is the daughter of physicist, philosopher and writer John Erpenbeck and Arabic translator Doris Kilias. Her paternal grandparents, Fritz Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner, were both authors and members of the East German cultural elite. In Berlin she attended an Advanced High School, from which she graduated in 1985. As a child, she lived in Italy for a year. She completed a two-year apprenticeship as a bookbinder before working at several theatres 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 (studying with, among others, Ruth Berghaus, Heiner Müller and Peter Konwitschny) at the Hanns Eisler Music Conservatory. After the successful completion of her studies in 1994, with a production of Béla Bartók's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle in her parish church and in the Kunsthaus Tacheles, she spent some time at first as an assistant director at the opera house in Graz, where in 1997 she did her own productions of Schoenberg's Erwartung, Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle and a world premiere of her own piece Cats Have Seven Lives.
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