Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a novelist and writer from Prague who was Jewish, Austrian, and Czech and wrote in German. He is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastique, and typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. The term Kafkaesque has entered the lexicon to describe bizarre situations like those depicted in his writing. The domain of mystical parables overlaps with the alienating experience of urban life's indecipherable complexities in these stories. His best-known works include the novella The Metamorphosis (1915) and the novels The Trial (1924) and The Castle (1926).

Though the novels and short stories that Kafka wrote are typically invoked in his précis, he is also celebrated for his brief fables and aphorisms. Like his longer fiction, these sketches may be brutal in some aspects, but their dreadfulness is frequently funny. A close acquaintance of Kafka's remarks that both his audience and the author himself sometimes laughed so much during readings that Kafka could not continue in his delivery, finding it necessary to collect himself before completing his recitation of the work.

The parables are sometimes noted for their resemblance to Chasidic fairy tales, in a universe where the transcendental source of authority is absent or unknowable.

Kafka's impact is evident in the frequent reception of his writing as a form of prophetic or premonitory vision, anticipating the character of a totalitarian future in the nightmarish logic of his presentation of the lived-present. These perceptions appear in the way that he renders the world inhabited by his characters and in his commentaries written in diaries, letters and aphorisms.

Kafka was born into a middle-class German- and Yiddish-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (later the capital of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic). He trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education was employed full-time in various legal and insurance jobs. His professional obligations led to internal conflict as he felt that his true vocation was writing. Only a minority of his works were published during his life; the story-collections Contemplation (1912) and A Country Doctor (1919), and individual stories, such as his novella The Metamorphosis, were published in literary magazines, but they received little attention. He wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never married. He died relatively unknown in 1924 of tuberculosis, aged 40.

Kafka was a prolific writer, but he burned an estimated 90 percent of his total work due to persistent struggles with self-doubt. Much of the remaining 10 percent is lost or otherwise unpublished. In his will, Kafka instructed his close friend and literary executor, Max Brod, to destroy his unfinished works, including his novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika (1927), but Brod ignored these instructions and had much of his work published.

Kafka's writings began to receive the highest possible critical acclaim when they were re-released amidst the imposition of the Nuremberg Racial Hygiene Laws in 1935 as a complete set by Schocken, however distribution and broad awareness of these works was stymied by the totalitarian atmosphere of the Nazi regime. The final volumes of this set were released after Schocken was forced to relocate to Prague. The works became more famous in German-speaking countries after World War II, influencing German literature, and its influence spread elsewhere in the world in the 1960s. A critical edition of his complete works, including many elements that had been edited out by Brod in the earlier Schocken collection, was released by S. Fischer Verlag in the final decades of the 20th century.

It has also influenced artists, composers, film-makers, historians, religious scholars, cultural theorists and philosophers.