Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. Her grandparents are the authors Fritz Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner. After training as a book-binder she studied theatre science and music stage direction while working as an opera director. Debuting with her short novel, Story of the Old Child, she followed with other literary publications, including novels, short stories, and stage plays. Her novel, The End of Days, was enthusiastically received by both the public and press alike and won her (and her translator, Susan Bernofsky) several awards, including the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2015.

A young adult when Germany united in 1990, Erpenbeck witnessed the swift dismantling of her state and the erasure of much of her culture when the East was incorporated into the West. For Erpenbeck, this contributed to her worldview that nothing lasted, not home, not country, not even memory. Erpenbeck’s work presents the twentieth century a minefield that can only be survived through luck and coincidence. Her uniqueness lies in her experimentation with form, but also in the way she conceptualizes time and place, as cyclical and linear, erratic in permanence, truth, pace and direction.

Her novel, Go, Went, Gone, won, among other awards, the Thomas Mann Prize and the Premio Strega Europeo. In 2017, Erpenbeck was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Erpenbeck lives in Berlin with her husband, conductor Wolfgang Bozic, and her son.