At Night All Blood Is Black, David Diop, translated by Anna Mocschovakis (Pushkin)
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell (Granta)
When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West (Pushkin)
The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century, Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken (Lolli)
The award is given “every year for a single book that is translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland.” The £50,000 prize is divided equally among the author and translator(s). Shortlisted authors and translators will each receive £1,000. Judges for 2021 are Aida Edemariam, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Neel Mukherjee, Olivette Otele, and George Szirtes. The winner will be announced on June 2, 2021.
Booker International shortlist spans not just globe but outer space Books on six-strong shortlist for £50,000 prize set in Europe, Latin America and space
about an hour ago
As one might expect from a prize with a global reach, the six-strong shortlist for this year’s Booker International Prize for fiction contains multitudes and dazzles with its variety, translated into English from Danish, French, Spanish and Russian.
Two are short story collections, one terrifying tales of magic realism set in contemporary Argentina, the other accounts of defining moments from the history of science. The novels tell of two Senegalese soldiers fighting for France during the first World War; the lives of the crew on a space ship in the 22nd century; an exploration of cultural and personal memory, based on the author’s Jewish family history in Russia; and a tale of rebellion against power and privilege set during the Reformation but inspired by today’s Gilets Jaunes protests.
Last modified on Thu 22 Apr 2021 12.01 EDT
From Maria Stepanovaâs family memoir to a historical essay by Ãric Vuillard, this yearâs shortlist for the International Booker prize for translated fiction is highlighting works that âare really pushing the boundariesâ of fiction and nonfiction.
The International Booker goes to âthe finest fiction from around the worldâ that has been translated into English. Six books are now in the running for the £50,000 award, which is split equally between author and translator, all of them displaying âan extraordinary amount of ingenuity and originalityâ, said chair of judges Lucy Hughes-Hallett.
After reading 125 books to come up with their final six, the judges found they were swayed towards works that blurred the lines between fiction and nonfiction.