Metamorphoses By Karolina Watroba ... 'A high-spirited, richly informed, and original portrait, a cross between biography, literary analysis and a study in modern 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.
Author
![Karolina Watroba]()
Karolina Watroba
I research and teach modern literature, film, and culture, specialising in European modernism and its global reception and continuing relevance today. I work across several languages, including German, Polish, Spanish, and Korean. I am 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, I was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford.