'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.' Marina Warner In 2024 exactly one hundred years after his death at the
age of 40 readers 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 travelling 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. Metamorphoses is a non-chronological journey through
Kafka's life drawing together literary scholarship with the responses of his readers through
time. It is a both an exploration of Kafka's life and an exciting new way of approaching
literary history.
