Franz Kafka was one of the major German-language fiction writers of the 20th century. A middle-class Jew based in Prague, his unique body of writing--many incomplete and most published posthumously--has become amongst the most influential in Western literature.

Kafka's works - including the stories Das Urteil (1913, "The Judgement"), In der Strafkolonie (1920, "In the Penal Colony"); the novella Die Verwandlung ("The Metamorphosis"); and unfinished novels Der Prozess ("The Trial") and Das SchloB ("The Castle") - have come to embody the blend of absurd, surreal and mundane which gave rise to the adjective "kafkaesque".

Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, the capital of Bohemia.

From Wikipedia