The International Booker Prize 2024 Shortlist has been announced with six titles of fiction translated into English, from a longlist of thirteen.
The shortlist is as follows:
- Not a River by Selva Almada (translated by Annie McDermott)
- Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Michael Hofmann)
- The Details by Ia Genberg (translated by Kira Josefsson)
- Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong (translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae)
- What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma (translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey)
- Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior (translated by Johnny Lorenz)
Reading is a necessary enlargement of human experience. Why be confined to one perspective, one life? Novels carry us to places where we might never set foot and connect us with new sensations and memories. Our shortlist shows us lives lived against the backdrop of history or, more precisely, interweaves the intimate and the political in radically original ways. These books bear the weight of the past while at the same time engaging with current realities of racism and oppression, global violence and ecological disaster. Some seem altogether timeless in their careful and vivid accounts of the dynamics of family, love and heartbreak, trauma and grief.
The prize awards £25,000 to the author and £25,000 to the translator, in recognition of the essential work of translators in bringing fiction to a wider audience. I am keen to read more translated fiction, and some of the titles on this shortlist sound interesting if I can track them down.
The winner will be announced on 21 May 2024.