The shortlist for the International Booker Prize has been revealed, with six books in contention for the U.K. award for outstanding fiction translated into English.
German author Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann were named finalists for Kairos, a novel set in the final days of East Germany. South Korean writer Hwang Sok-yong and translators Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae made the shortlist for Mater 2-10; Erpenbeck, Hwang, and Kim-Russell have all been longlisted for the prize before.
Not a River, written by Argentine author Selva Almada and translated by Annie McDermott, made the shortlist, alongside The Details, written by Swedish novelist Ia Genberg and translated by Kira Josefsson.
The other books named finalists were What I’d Rather Not Think About, written by Dutch author Jente Posthuma and translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey, and Crooked Plow, written by Brazilian novelist Itamar Vieira Junior and translated by Johnny Lorenz.
Eleanor Wachtel, the chair of judges for this year’s prize, said in a statement, “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.”
The International Booker Prize was first awarded in 2005. Previous winners include The Vegetarian, written by South Korean novelist Han Kang and translated by Deborah Smith, and At Night All Blood Is Black, written by French author David Diop and translated by Anna Moschovakis.
The winner of this year’s prize will be announced at a ceremony in London on May 21.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
