Authors Like Franz Kafka

Robert Walser

Swiss · Jakob von Gunten (1909), The Walk (1917)

Jakob von Gunten is the diary of a boy at a school for servants where the pupils learn almost nothing and the headmaster's sister may be dying upstairs, narrated by someone delighted to be made small. Walser wrote hundreds of short prose pieces, worked as a clerk and a butler, spent the last decades of his life in a sanatorium having stopped writing entirely, and died on a walk in the snow in 1956. Kafka read him aloud to friends and admired him enormously.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Russian · Notes from Underground (1864), The Trial's ancestor Crime and Punishment (1866)

Dostoevsky survived a staged execution, served four years at hard labour in Siberia, and wrote five novels about people who have decided the rules do not apply to them. Notes from Underground is a hundred and fifty pages of a man arguing with himself and with the reader from a basement in St Petersburg, and it invented a voice that twentieth-century fiction has never stopped using.

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Heinrich von Kleist

German · Michael Kohlhaas (1810), The Marquise of O (1808)

Michael Kohlhaas is a horse dealer in sixteenth-century Saxony who is cheated of two horses at a border post, cannot obtain redress through any legal channel, and escalates — by perfectly logical steps — into burning cities. Kleist wrote in long, clause-heavy sentences that hold a catastrophe in suspension, was ignored in his lifetime, and died in 1811 at thirty-four.

Bruno Schulz

Polish · The Street of Crocodiles (1934), Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937)

Schulz taught drawing at a secondary school in Drohobycz, in what is now Ukraine, and wrote two collections of stories that transform his own small provincial town into somewhere mythic: a father who turns into a bird, then a cockroach, then a crab, and shops that open onto other worlds. He is credited with the first Polish translation of The Trial. He was shot in the street by a Gestapo officer in 1942, and a novel he had been writing was lost.

Samuel Beckett

Irish · Waiting for Godot (1953), Molloy (1951)

Beckett wrote in French to strip his own style back, produced a trilogy of novels in which the narrators progressively lose their bodies, their names and their reasons for speaking, and a play in which two men wait for someone who does not come. He received the Nobel Prize in 1969 and did not attend. His prose gets shorter and barer with every decade until it is almost nothing.

Jorge Luis Borges

Argentine · Fictions (1944), The Aleph (1949)

Borges wrote almost nothing longer than fifteen pages: an infinite library of every possible book, a map at the scale of its territory, a man who reviews a novel that does not exist. He translated Kafka into Spanish, wrote an essay called “Kafka and His Precursors” arguing that a great writer creates his own ancestors backwards through literary history, and went blind while running the National Library.

Albert Camus

French-Algerian · The Stranger (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

The Stranger is a man who does not cry at his mother's funeral, kills an Algerian on a beach, and is convicted largely for the first thing rather than the second. The Myth of Sisyphus asks whether life is worth living in a universe that offers no explanation, and early editions appended an essay on hope and the absurd in the work of Kafka. Camus received the Nobel Prize in 1957.

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Kazuo Ishiguro

British · The Unconsoled (1995), Never Let Me Go (2005)

The Unconsoled is five hundred pages in which a famous pianist arrives in an unnamed European city for a concert and is prevented from reaching it by an unbroken sequence of obligations, detours and people who appear to know him; time and geography do not behave. It baffled reviewers on publication and is now widely considered his strangest and best. He received the Nobel Prize in 2017.

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Haruki Murakami

Japanese · Kafka on the Shore (2002), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994)

Murakami writes contemporary Japan with a hole in it: cats that talk, a man who sits at the bottom of a dry well, a boy who runs away and calls himself Kafka. He ran a jazz bar in Tokyo before publishing, translates American fiction into Japanese, and is read in more than fifty languages. Kafka on the Shore takes its title and some of its atmosphere directly from the writer it names.

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Milan Kundera

Czech-French · The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Testaments Betrayed (1993)

Kundera left Czechoslovakia in 1975, wrote in French from the 1990s, and produced several volumes of essays on the novel alongside the fiction. Testaments Betrayed devotes long sections to Kafka: to Brod's disobedience in publishing the work, to Brod's biography turning the novels into coded autobiography, and to the sentimentalising of a writer he considered fundamentally comic.