Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka wrote three unfinished novels and a body of stories that gave a word to the experience of being crushed by systems no one appears to control. Born in Prague in 1883 into a German-speaking Jewish family, he was dominated by his father Hermann, a self-made retailer whose contempt he described at length in the unsent Letter to His Father of 1919. He took a doctorate in law and worked from 1908 at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, assessing industrial injury claims. He was good at it and was promoted; the job gave him direct daily knowledge of bureaucratic procedure, maiming machinery and unanswerable institutions. He wrote at night. He published relatively little in his lifetime, including The Metamorphosis in 1915, which opens with Gregor Samsa waking as an insect and treats the fact with domestic practicality, and In the Penal Colony in 1919. The Trial, The Castle and Amerika were all left unfinished. His fiction proceeds by exact, unexcited prose describing impossible situations: a man arrested without being told the charge, a surveyor who cannot reach the authority that summoned him. There is no cruelty by any identifiable villain, which is the point. He was engaged twice to Felice Bauer and once to Julie Wohryzek, and broke each engagement; his correspondence with Milena Jesenská is a major part of the work. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917 and died in a sanatorium near Vienna in June 1924, aged forty, unable to eat. He instructed his friend Max Brod to burn everything unpublished. Brod refused and edited the novels into print. All three of Kafka's sisters were killed in the Holocaust.

• Lived: 1883 CE – 1924 CE
• Nationality: Czech
• Roles: writer