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Esther Kinsky

Esther Kinsky (b 1956, Germany) is an author and translator regarded as one of Germany’s foremost contemporary writers.

She grew up beside the Rhine, and lived in London for more than a decade before returning to Germany. In 2017-18, she held a visiting professorship at the Free University of Berlin.

Her most recent novel, Hain: Geländeroman, won the belles lettres category of the 2018 Leipzig Book Fair, and her novel Am Fluss (translated into English as River) received the 2015 Kranichsteiner Literature Prize and made the longlist for the German Book Prize.

She is also a prolific translator from English, Polish and Russian into German. Her translations include work by Olga Tokarczuk, the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Magnificent ... As with the work of W G Sebald, Kinsky constructs the past through landscape.

The New Yorker on River

The quality of Esther Kinsky’s writing is so good that you cannot fail to be spellbound by it.

The Modern Novel blog on River
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