Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was one of the major German-language fiction writers of the 20th century. A middle-class Jew based in Prague, his unique body of writing - many incomplete and most published posthumously - has become amongst the most influential in western literature. Kafka's works; including the stories Das Urteil (The Judgement), In der Strafkolonie (In the Penal Colony); the novella Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis); and unfinished novels Der Prozess (The Trial) and Das Schloß (The Castle) - have come to embody the blend of absurd, surreal and mundane which gave rise to the adjective 'kafkaesque'.