Six languages. Six countries. Three continents. The novels shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize span cultures, styles, and the breadth of human experience.
“Novels transport us to places we might never set foot and connect us to new sensations and new memories,” said Eleanor Wachtel, chair of the 2024 International Booker Prize jury, in a statement . “Our selection opens onto vast geographies of the mind, often showing lives lived against a backdrop of history or, more precisely, mixing the intimate and the political in a radically original way.”
Here is the list of finalists for the International Booker Prize 2024 (the winner will be announced on May 21):
Not a river by Selva Almada, translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott
Two men and their deceased friend’s teenage son go fishing. Frustrated after hours of wrestling with a hooked stingray, one of them shoots him with a revolver. They hang his corpse in their campsite and leave it to rot. Thus begins a story about masculinity, guilt, desire and external suspicion, described as “prophetic”, “ghostly” and “a punch in the gut”.
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from German by Michael Hofmann
Erpenbeck said Kairos is “the private story of a great love and its decline, but it is also the story of the dissolution of an entire political system”. In a review for NPR, Lily Meyer said that Erpenbeck’s message Kairos manages “to simultaneously echo and amplify the fissures between generations and between East and West.”
Crooked plow by Itamar Viera Junior, translated from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz
Two sisters are mystified by the powers of a knife they find under their grandmother’s bed. With magical and social realism, Viera Junior tells the story of subsistence farmers in Brazil’s poorest region. The youngest author preselected at 44 years old, Crooked plow is his first novel. The Booker Prize judges said it “testifies to the importance of remembering our history and protecting the land that sustains us”.
Mate 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae
This is Hwang Sok-yong’s ninth book translated into English. At 81, he is the oldest author on the shortlist. The Booker jury declared Mate 2-10 “vividly depicts the lives of ordinary Korean workers, from the Japanese colonial era, through liberation, and into the 21st century.”
What I prefer not to think about by Jente Posthuma, translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey
The narrator in What I prefer not to think about is a twin whose brother recently committed suicide. Posthumous said the story was inspired by a personal experience when “the one person I thought would still be there walked out of my life.” The telegraph praised the novel for its “total authenticity” and the way Posthuma writes in a “laconic, light and pointed manner.”
The details from the Genberg, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson
Genberg said she began writing The details, “just as the woman in the novel begins, in a COVID fever in April 2020, when I went to my library and picked up a random book that fell open into my hands.” A novel about relationships, connection, memory and time, The New York Times writes: “Genberg’s marvelous prose is also a kind of fever, bewitching and warm to the touch. »
The winner will be announced next month
The winner of the International Booker Prize 2024 will be announced at a ceremony on May 21 at the Tate Modern in London.
The prize of £50,000 (approximately $63,000) will be split equally between the author and translator or split equally among multiple translators. Shortlisted authors and translators will share a prize of £5,000 (approximately $6,300).
The event will be broadcast live on the Booker Prizes channels and presented by YouTuber Jack Edwards, known as the ‘resident librarian of the internet’.
Author Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel won the International Booker Prize last year for their novel. Temporal shelter.
This story was edited by Meghan Sullivan.
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