Franz Kafka

'Penguin Illustrated Lives' is a series of photographic biographies that offers a fresh, intimate portrait of some of our favourite writers. An incisive, lively text is accompanied by over 100 evocative images, many in colour and some previously unpublished, which depict the author's world - family, friends and artistic circle together with original book jackets, letters and other ephemera. Franz Kafka's name has become synonymous with the dark side of modernity. Born into a Jewish family in Prague in 1883, Kafka grew up amidst the social and political turmoil of the 'fin de siecle'. His writing reflects these tensions as well as his own tortured emotional life. But it is Kafka's ability to transform his 'dream-like inner life' into the language of the everyday and, at the same time, portray the terror facing the individual in a hostile, indifferent world that makes his work still speak to us today.