Each year the International Booker Prize recognises the best novels and short story collections from around the world that have been translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. The £50,000 prize money is divided equally between the author and the translator. In addition, a prize of £5,000 is also divided equally between shortlisted authors and translators.
The 13 books on the longlist have been chosen by a jury chaired by broadcaster and journalist Eleanor Wachtel, poet Natalie Diaz, novelist Romesh Gunesekera, visual artist William Kentridge, and editor and translator Aaron Robertson.
A quarter of the list is written by South American authors, with books representing Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Venezuela. The longlisted books have been translated from Albanian, Dutch, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. The inaugural winner of the prize in 2005, Ismail Kadare, has made it to the longlist while nine authors and nine translators have been listed for the first time.
The shortlist of six books will be announced on April 9 and the winning title will be announced at a ceremony in London on May 21.
Here is a guide to the 13 longlisted titles.
The Silver Bone, Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk
Kyiv, 1919. The Soviets control the city, but White armies menace them from the West. No man trusts his neighbour and any spark of resistance may ignite into open rebellion. When Samson Kolechko’s father is murdered, his last act is to save his son from a falling Cossack sabre. Deprived of his right ear instead of his head, Samson is left an orphan, with only his father’s collection of abacuses for company. Until, that is, his flat is requisitioned by two Red Army soldiers, whose secret plans Samson is somehow able to overhear with uncanny clarity. Eager to thwart them, he stumbles into a world of murder and intrigue that will either be the making of him – or finish what the Cossack started.
Simpatía, Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, translated from the Spanish by Noel Hernández González and Daniel Hahn
Set in the Venezuela of Nicolas Maduro amid a mass exodus of the intellectual class who have been leaving their pets behind. Ulises Kan, the protagonist and a movie buff, receives a text message from his wife, Paulina, saying she is leaving the country (and him). Ulises is not heartbroken, but liberated by Paulina’s departure. As two other events end up disrupting his life even further, Ulises discovers that he has been entrusted with a mission – to transform Los Argonautas, the great family home, into a shelter for abandoned dogs. If he manages to do it in time, he will inherit the luxurious apartment that he had shared with Paulina.
Not a River, Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott
Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise. The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided?
Undiscovered, Gabriela Wiener, translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches
Alone in an ethnographic museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener is confronted with her unusual inheritance. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artefacts, the spoils of European colonial plunder, many of them from her home country of Peru. Peering through the glass, she sees sculptures of Indigenous faces that resemble her own – but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener. In the wake of her father’s death, Gabriela begins delving into all she has inherited from her paternal line. From the brutal trail of racism and theft Charles was responsible for, to revelations of her father’s infidelity, she traces a legacy of abandonment, jealousy and colonial violence, and questions its impact on her own struggles with desire, love and race in a polyamorous relationship.
White Nights, Urszula Honek, translated from the Polish by Kate Webster
White Nights is a series of thirteen interconnected stories concerning the various tragedies and misfortunes that befall a group of people who all grew up and live(d) in the same village in the Beskid Niski region, in southern Poland. Each story centres itself around a different character and how it is that they manage to cope, survive or merely exist, despite, and often in ignorance of, the poverty, disappointment, tragedy, despair, brutality and general sense of futility that surrounds them.
Mater 2-10, Hwang Sok-yong, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae
Centred on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high-altitude sit-in, Mater 2-10 vividly depicts the lives of ordinary working Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the 21st century.
What I’d Rather Not Think About, Jente Posthuma, translated from the Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey
What if one-half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can’t live without them? This question lies at the heart of Jente Posthuma’s deceptively simple What I’d Rather Not Think About. The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood and tells of their adult lives: how her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely.
Crooked Plow, Itamar Vieira Junior, translated from the Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz
Deep in Brazil’s neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother’s bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever.
The House on Via Gemito, Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky
The modest apartment in Via Gemito smells of paint and white spirit. The living room furniture is pushed up against the wall to create a makeshift studio, and drying canvases must be moved off the beds each night. Federí, the father, a railway clerk, is convinced of possessing great artistic talent. If he didn’t have a family to feed, he’d be a world-famous painter. Ambitious and frustrated, genuinely talented but full of arrogance and resentment, his life is marked by bitter disappointment. His long-suffering wife and their four sons bear the brunt. It’s his firstborn who, years later, will sift the lies from the truth to tell the story of a man he spent his whole life trying not to resemble.
Lost on Me, Veronica Raimo, translated from the Italian by Leah Janeczko
Vero has grown up in Rome with her eccentric family: an omnipresent mother who is devoted to her own anxiety, a father ruled by hygienic and architectural obsessions, and a precocious genius brother at the centre of their attention. As she becomes an adult, Vero’s need to strike out on her own leads her into bizarre and comical situations. As she continues to plot escapades and her mother’s relentless tracking methods and guilt-tripping mastery thwart her at every turn, it is no wonder that Vero becomes a writer – and a liar – inventing stories in a bid for her own sanity.
A Dictator Calls, Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson
In June 1934, Joseph Stalin allegedly telephoned the famous novelist and poet Boris Pasternak to discuss the arrest of fellow Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam. In a fascinating combination of dreams and dossier facts, Ismail Kadare, winner of the inaugural International Booker Prize, reconstructs the three minutes they spoke and the aftershocks of this tense, mysterious moment in modern history. Weaving together the accounts of witnesses, reporters and writers such as Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, Kadare tells a gripping story of power and political structures, of the relationship between writers and tyranny.
Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann
Berlin. July 11, 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.
The Details, Ia Genberg, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson
A famous broadcaster writes a forgotten love letter; a friend abruptly disappears; a lover leaves something unexpected behind; a traumatised woman is consumed by her own anxiety. In the throes of a high fever, a woman lies bedridden. Suddenly, she is struck with an urge to revisit a particular novel from her past. Inside the book is an inscription: a message from an ex-girlfriend. Pages from her past begin to flip, full of things she cannot forget and people who cannot be forgotten. Johanna, that same ex-girlfriend, now a famous TV host. Niki, the friend who disappeared all those years ago. Alejandro, who appears like a storm in precisely the right moment. And Birgitte, whose elusive qualities shield a painful secret. Who is the real subject of a portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush?
