Karolina Watroba.
KAROLINA WATROBA
METAMORPHOSES: IN SEARCH OF FRANZ KAFKA
Franz Kafka (born 1883) was the son of a Czech Jewish fashion retailer who lived in Prague. Franz Kafka trained as a lawyer, and spent fifteen years working as a lawyer for an insurance company. Kafka was a prolific writer, but he had to do this in his spare time. He is regarded as a major figure in twentieth century literature, his work combining realism and the fantastic. His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis and the short novels The Trial and The Castle. Kafka finished none of his ful-length novels, and burned about 90% of his work. He died in obscurity at the age of 40 in 924. It was only after his death that his reputation grew.
Watroba’s book on Kafka is an unconventional biography, telling Kafka’s story through the stories of his readers around the world, focusing on Oxford, Berline, Prague, Jerusalem and Seoul.
The Financial Times wrote of the book: ‘Karolina Watroba goes in search of the afterlives of Kafka, who, like some form of ghostly artificial intelligence, still seems to be processing our world and offering miraculously fresh insights. Posthumously, Kafka's genius only swells’. The Literary Review wrote:’ Animated ... admirable ... takes the reader from Oxford to Berlin, Prague to Tel Aviv, and China to South Korea’.
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Karolina Watroba researces and teaches modern literature, film, and culture, specialising in European modernism and its global reception. She works across several languages, including German, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, and Korean. She is a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Faculty of Medieval & Modern Languages, University of Oxford. In 2019-2024, she was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford.
