Last night, Jenny Erpenbeck was named the winner of the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for her double PEN award-winning novel The End of Days. Erpenbeck is only the second woman writer to win the Prize since its founding in 1990. She is also the third PEN-supported writer to win the Prize; the other winners are The Armies by Evelio Rosero, translated by Anne Mclean (2009) and The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim, translated by Jonathan Wright (2014).
In this special PEN Atlas Q&A, the author and director shares her thoughts on the influence of history in her work, experimental narrative form and her relationship with her translator Susan Bernofsky.