In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death at the age of forty, customers all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka.

Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books filled with mysterious courts and monstrous insects.

Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka? Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a fellow of Oxford’s All Souls College, will tell Kafka’s story beyond the boundaries of language, time, and space, traveling from the Prague of Kafka’s birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are, in part, homages to the great man himself.