Books

International Booker Prize shortlist: Europe and South America dominate

Independent presses continue to dominate, with five of six titles on the shortlist

International Booker Prize 2024 shortlisted titles

Martin Doyle
Tue Apr 9 2024 - 14:24

Six languages (Dutch, German, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish), six countries (Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, South Korea and Sweden) and three continents (Asia, Europe and South America) are represented on this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist, the world’s most significant award for a single work of translated fiction, is announced.

Itamar Viera Junior is shortlisted for his debut novel, Crooked Plow, and Hwang Sok-yong is shortlisted for his ninth book translated into English. Previously longlisted authors Hwang and Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Sora Kim-Russell progress to the shortlist for the first time. Five of the books are published by independents, including two from Scribe UK. Indies have won the prize six times out of eight since 2016.

The shortlist

Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz

READ MORE

Not a River by Selva Almada, translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from German by Michael Hofmann

What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey

The Details by la Genberg, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson

The shortlist was chosen by a judging panel, chaired by writer and broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel, featuring poet Natalie Diaz; Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Romesh Gunesekera; visual artist William Kentridge; and writer, editor and translator Aaron Robertson.

The prize recognises the vital work of translators with the £50,000 prize money divided equally: £25,000 each for the author and the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators). In addition, there is a prize of £5,000 for each of the shortlisted titles: £2,500 for the author and £2,500 for the translator.

The winner will be revealed at a ceremony on Tuesday, May 21st in the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern.

Wachtel said: “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 opens onto vast geographies of the mind, often showing lives lived against the backdrop of history or, more precisely, interweaving 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.

“Hwang Sok-yong’s multi-dimensional epic tale, Mater 2-10, threads together three generations of Korean railroad workers; in Swedish author Ia Genberg’s quiet chronicle of four characters, The Details, the quotidian gains density and breadth; the story of subsistence farmers in Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow reveals a blend of magical and social realism amidst brutality in Brazil’s poorest region; Dutch novelist Jente Posthuma’s smart, compelling portrayal of sibling love and loss informs What I’d Rather Not Think About.

“The thing about great writing is that it’s implicitly optimistic. From Selva Almada’s economical evocation of foreboding and danger in a remote corner of Argentina, Not a River, to Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck’s intense, rich drama about the entanglement of personal and national transformations during the dying years of East Germany, words have the power to make connections and inhabit other sensibilities – to illuminate.”

Quotes from the shortlistees, along with judges’ comments on the shortlisted books

Not a River by Selva Almada, translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott

The author said: ‘I wanted to write this story because it is also part of my own story: Not a River is inspired by the territory where I was born and raised, by the people who inhabit that land and who, in many cases, were marginalised by neoliberal policies that condemn the majority to poverty and to an absence of minimum rights such as the right to work, to education and to health. This is my humble tribute to my land: to its rivers, its animals, its trees and the people who live in it.’

The translator said: ‘The voices in Selva Almada’s novels are so distinctive and so far from my own that I have to go looking for them elsewhere. For Not a River, I read a whole stack of fishing-related books, from Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea to The River Why, David James Duncan’s genuinely wonderful account of a life spent trout-fishing in Oregon, and I also spent hours trawling (no pun intended) through fishing forums and YouTube videos.’

The judges said: ‘A deceptively simple novel about a seemingly bucolic fishing trip in Argentina which slowly reveals a deep sense of foreboding and memories of trauma. The economy and clarity of the writing hold the reader from the very beginning, while the author feels like a secure guide, taking us by the hand through dangerous terrain.’

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from German by Michael Hofmann

The author said: ‘It’s a private story of a big love and its decay, but it’s also a story of the dissolution of a whole political system. Simply put: How can something that seems right in the beginning, turn into something wrong? This transition interested me.’

The translator said: ‘[Fiction in translation] incorporates distance and difference and teaches empathy. Down with the monstrous idiocy of relatability! Books don’t exist to be about you.’

The judges said: ‘Uncomfortable and complex, this is a richly textured evocation of a tormented love affair in the dying years of East Germany, which shows how the weight of history impinges on our lives. In fluid, musical sentences, Erpenbeck brings the reader close to her characters and to the fraught demands they face.’

The Details by la Genberg, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson

The author said: ‘I started just as the woman in the novel starts, in a COVID fever in April 2020, when I went to my bookshelf and picked up a random book that fell open in my hands, revealing a small inscription from the person who had given me the book 25 years earlier. At the feverish sight of these handwritten lines, I was struck by a very clear memory that played in a certain tone in my head, and from that experience, I simply started writing.’

The translator said: ‘Ia [Genberg] builds this novel with sentences that are long and meandering, a quality that’s integral to the exploration of memory and time’s passage that makes up the humming bassline of the book. English is, of course, fond of brief, effective statements. Part of what’s fun about translation is getting to push and stretch linguistic conventions of the language you’re translating into.’

The judges said: ‘A delicately written Swedish novel that speaks to our contemporary experiences of connection and isolation and which shows how quickly people move in and out of our lives. This is a book about friendship and loss in which the narrator quickly becomes a companion to whose voice you want to continue listening until the very end.’

Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae

The author said: ‘The inspiration for this novel was an elderly gentleman I met during my visit to North Korea in 1989. During the Japanese colonial occupation, he was a locomotive engineer who drove trains across the entire Korean peninsula, all the way up to Changchun in mainland China. He went north after the start of the Korean War. I was delighted to learn that his family had lived in the rail workers’ housing very close to where I’d grown up. I took copious notes at the time, as I knew I wanted to write about my memories of the place, his memories. I had no idea it would take me over 30 years to do so.’

The translators said: ‘Translated stories set in an unfamiliar background, told in a different literary style, yet exploring universal themes, can entertain and broaden the minds of readers just as much as stories written in their original language.’

The judges said: ‘A passionate novel of Korean resilience, which depicts the miracles of determination and survival of an entire culture through its most despairing and hopeful times.’

What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey

The author said: ‘For me, each book begins very personally, with something happening within myself. For this book, it was the emotions I experienced when the one person I thought would always be there withdrew from my life. It was as if suddenly I had no ground beneath my feet and was falling into an endless abyss. My situation was very different from the protagonist’s situation in my book – nobody died – but the feelings were similar. It was a grieving process.’

The translator said: ‘For What I’d Rather Not Think About, I was searching for a particular voice in English. It’s Gen X/elder millennial, darkly humorous, covertly anxious, a little jaded and occasionally quite oblivious. That balance can be difficult to strike. The other thing I’m always inspired by is the sound of the original text. Whether it’s poetry or fiction, I like to replicate the sound of the original Dutch wherever possible. It’s the greatest compliment when a writer says my translation sounds like theirs when they read it aloud.’

The judges said: ‘A moving portrait of the intertwining lives of Dutch twins, grappling with the complexities of identity, loss, and the unspoken bonds that define us. The book’s raw exploration of a sibling relationship, coupled with a rare authenticity in depicting the process of mourning, provides a narrative that’s both uniquely insightful and tender in its humanity.’

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz

The author said: ‘I wrote Crooked Plow for many reasons, but if I had to choose just one, I’d say this: I wanted to bring to the page the love that Brazilian farmers feel for the land itself, for the earth of the Brazilian countryside. For me, to write is an experience of surprise – a surprise quite similar to that of reading. I never know in advance the path my story will take.’

The translator said: ‘I translated Crooked Plow over the course of three years. My first step was to get everything down in English, but the first draft of a chapter is like a shipwreck on the page. I return to it and keep returning; I tinker and fix and reassemble. Sometimes a hammer is needed, sometimes sandpaper. When things are going well, the translator can feel the energy shifting, and the mainsail fills with wind.’

The judges said: ‘An evocative journey into the heart of rural Brazil, which speaks to the importance of remembering our histories and protecting the land that sustains us. The novel’s deep dive into the quilombo communities offers a unique window into a world where the legacy of resistance and the fight for land rights weave through the personal and collective narratives of its characters, a perspective rarely captured with such intimacy and authenticity.’

Martin Doyle

Martin Doyle

Martin Doyle is Books Editor of The Irish Times

LATEST STORIES