Ask your average German about Jenny Erpenbeck, and they may very well respond, "Jenny who?"

Yet the contemporary German author has made a name for herself beyond Germany's borders; she's showered with prizes and has even been predicted to one day win the Nobel Prize in literature. Her books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and she's read to thrilled audiences in Uzbekistan, Mexico and India during her global book tours.

So why the discrepancy?

It's not as if Erpenbeck is totally unknown in Germany — quite the contrary. She has a loyal readership, and she can usually count on one literary prize a year, earning her media mentions.

Her 2021 novel, "Kairos," has also received different awards — just no major Germans one, like the German Book Prize or the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Yet, in keeping with the pattern, the novel's English translation has garnered acclaim beyond Germany's borders, earning her, and her translator Michael Hofmann, the prestigious International Booker Prize .

Perhaps there is something to Erpenbeck's feeling that the wall that once separated East and West Germany never really fell, that West German cultural perspectives continue to dominate public discourse.

Erpenbeck is from the former East Germany. Born in East Berlin in 1967, she was 22 when the Berlin Wall came down. The state in which she had grown up, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), simply........

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