Die Verwandlung

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born in Prague into a German-speaking Jewish family, studied law and spent his working life as a conscientious official at an insurance institute for workers' accidents. He wrote at night, in a few intense bursts, and published only a handful of stories in his lifetime.

Dying of tuberculosis at forty, he asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his manuscripts; Brod refused and published The Trial, The Castle and much more. Kafka's dreamlike stories of guilt, bureaucracy and isolation gave the world the word 'Kafkaesque', and few twentieth-century writers have been more influential.