Metamorphoses

Karolina Watroba is a research fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford, where she works on modern literature and film across eight European languages and beyond, with a focus on German, English, and Polish.

Published to mark the centenary of Kafka's death, this is an inventive biography that presents the absurdist master as a writer for our times
A high-spirited, richly informed, and original portrait, a cross between biography, literary analysis and a study in modern canonisation: Karolina Watroba is an inspired guide and her book a pleasure to read.
It might seem obvious, where our obsession with Kafka's life stems from. We want to know what made Kafka Kafka. But there is also another part to this story, a part that does not get told nearly as often. To understand how Kafka became Kafka, we cannot stop in 1924, the year of his death, where most biographies end. To gain the status he gained, Kafka needed readers.