“People don’t tend to believe me, but our default mode in the east was scepticism towards the government, especially among those who still believed that socialism deserved a better chance. When we read a newspaper, the first question was always “What does that really mean?”. It gave us a much better training, an alertness to potential manipulation. Sometimes I think that people in the west were much more streamlined, much more easily manipulated with their 100% faith in democracy while remaining largely unquestioning of the economic system.

“I do believe it is still a valid starting point to say that the means of production as we have them under capitalism, the fixation with growth, will eventually lead to the end of the world, perhaps in our own lifetime. Hope in a more human society, where people are treated fairly independent of race, gender or appearance – I still take that very seriously. And when we look at what is happening with refugee boats in the Mediterranean, we see that the west doesn’t always take these things as seriously as it should.”

Jenny Erpenbeck, winner of the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Read the whole of her marvellous interview with Philip Oltermann for The Guardian here.