[Eric]

Kafka is one of those multi-categorisable authors. As a (non-practising) Jew, with German as his mother-tongue, some knowledge of Yiddish and maybe a lot more of Czech, he is hard to pin down in our modern categories of citizen of a nation-state. He is a product of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire.

He falls into the same category, perhaps, as a Finland-Swede, anno 2008, who has Swedish as his mother-tongue, has a very good knowledge of Finnish (living in, say, Helsinki, where you just can't survive in everyday life without Finnish), a decent knowledge of English, but will always write his novels in his mother-tongue, Swedish.

There are many countries in Europe where there are language majorities and minorities. You can categorise writers living there by the language they write in, or by what's written in their passport. Belgium is one such country. You either write in Dutch or French - but you're still Belgian. Ditto Spain. Catalan, Galician and Basque writers are still Spanish citizens. Or those writing in Hungarian in Romania. Or Switzerland, with its four languages.

Britain is rather different. Our dominant language doubles up as an international lingua franca. This makes people in Britain think differently about writing-language and nationality, perhaps.