Born inEast Berlin,[4] Erpenbeck is the daughter of physicist, philosopher and writerJohn Erpenbeck [de] and Arabic translatorDoris Kilias.[1] Her paternal grandparents,Fritz Erpenbeck andHedda Zinner, were both authors and members of the East German cultural elite.[5][6] InBerlin she attended an Advanced High School, from which she graduated in 1985. As a child, she lived in Italy for a year.[7] She completed a two-year apprenticeship as abookbinder before working at several theatres as props andwardrobe supervisor.
In the 1990s, Erpenbeck started a writing career in addition to her directing. She later said, "the end of the system that I knew, that I grew up in — this made me write.”[8] She is author of narrativeprose andplays: her debut novella in 1999,Geschichte vom alten Kind (The Old Child); in 2001, her collection of storiesTand (Trinkets); in 2004, the novellaWörterbuch (The Book of Words); and in 2008, the novelHeimsuchung (Visitation). In 2007, Erpenbeck took over a biweekly column by Nicole Krauss in theFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In 2015, the English translation of her novelAller Tage Abend (The End of Days) bySusan Bernofsky won theIndependent Foreign Fiction Prize.
"Thirty years have passed since the country in which I was born is gone, so I could dare to look back and take my time to carefully research what I lived through without really being aware of it," she said.[11]
Erpenbeck's works have been translated into Danish, English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Dutch, Swedish, Slovene, Spanish, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Arabic, Estonian, Turkish, Croatian and Finnish.
Geschichte vom alten Kind (1999).The Old Child, trans.Susan Bernofsky.
Published with five stories fromTand asThe Old Child and Other Stories (New Directions, 2005), and inThe Old Child and The Book of Words (Portobello, 2008).
Tand (2001).Trinkets. Short stories.
Wörterbuch (2004).The Book of Words, trans. Susan Bernofsky (New Directions/Portobello, 2007), and inThe Old Child and The Book of Words (Portobello, 2008).
Bartel, Heike and Elizabeth Boa (eds.)Pushing at Boundaries: Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.ISBN978-90-420-2051-1. Amsterdam
Wiebke, Eden. "To Express with Words, was Always the Next," inNo Fear of Big Emotions. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2003.ISBN3-596-15474-X, pp. 13–32 (Jenny Erpenbeck interview)
