Jenny Erpenbeck

Jenny Erpenbeck in 2012

Jenny Erpenbeck (born 12 March 1967 in East Berlin) is a German director and writer.

Life

Jenny Erpenbeck is the daughter of the physicist, philosopher and writer John Erpenbeck and the Arabic translator Doris Kilias. Her grandparents are the authors Fritz Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner. In Berlin she attended an Advanced High School, where she graduated in 1985. She then completed a two-year apprenticeship as a bookbinder before working at several theaters 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. As a freelance director, she directed in 1998 different opera houses in Germany and Austria, including Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in Aachen, Acis and Galatea at the Berlin State Opera and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Zaide in Nuremberg/Erlangen.

In the 1990s Erpenbeck started a writing career in addition to her directing. She is author of narrative prose and plays: in 1999, History of the Old Child, her debut; in 2001, her collection of stories Trinkets; in 2004, the novella Dictionary; and in February 2008, the novel Visitation. In March 2007, Erpenbeck took over a biweekly column by Nicole Krauss in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Erpenbeck lives in Berlin with her son, born 2002.

Works

Fiction

• The Old Child (Geschichte vom alten Kind) (1999) ISBN 3-8218-0784-9
• Trinkets: Stories (2001) ISBN 3-8218-0696-6
• The Book of Words (Wörterbuch) (2004) ISBN 3-8218-0742-3
• Visitation (Heimsuchung ) (2008) ISBN 978-3-8218-5773-2
• Things that Disappear (Dinge, die verschwinden) (2009) ISBN 978-3-86971-004-4
• The End of Days (2012) ISBN 978-0-8112-2192-4

Plays

• Cats Have Seven Lives (Katzen haben sieben Leben) (2000)
• Physical Exercises for a Sinner (2003)

Erpenbeck's works have been translated into Danish, English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Dutch, Swedish, Slovene, Spanish, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Arabic and Estonian.

Recognition

• 2001 Jury Prize at the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition in Klagenfurt
• 2001 Several residencies (Ledig Rowohlt House in New York, Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf)
• 2004 GEDOK literature prize
• 2006 Winner of the Scholarship Island Writers on Sylt
• 2008 Solothurner Literaturpreis
• 2008 Heimito von Doderer Literature Prize
• 2008 Hertha-Koenig-Literature Prize
• 2009 Award of the North LiteraTour
• 2010 Literature Prize of the Steel Foundation Eisenhüttenstadt
• 2011 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize, shortlisted for Visitation
• 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, winner for The End of Days (German; trans. Susan Bernofsky)
• 2016 Thomas Mann Prize

Further reading

• Bartel, Heike and Elizabeth Boa (eds.) Pushing at Boundaries: Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. ISBN 978-90-420-2051-1. Amsterdam
• Wiebke, Eden. "To Express with Words, was Always the Next," in No Fear of Big Emotions. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2003. ISBN 3-596-15474-X, pp. 13–32 (Jenny Erpenbeck interview)