Complementing The Booker Prize for Fiction, this is a prestigious annual award for a single book that is translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. It aims to encourage more publishing and reading of quality works of imagination from all over the world, and to give greater recognition to the role of translators. In fact, it is the only literary award to split the prize money of £50,000 equally between author and translator. This year’s longlist includes both novels and short stories, as well as a number of works which blur the boundaries between fiction, memoir and biography. A total of thirteen books translated from eleven different languages.
The longlist was announced at the end of March, with the shortlist of six to follow on 22nd April. The overall winner will be revealed on 2nd June in a virtual event to be streamed from Coventry, 2021 City of Culture.
This week we have spent some time digesting the list and reading more about some of the authors and their work. You can view the full list here and for now we’ve selected three of our favourites that we hope will make the shortlist.
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette.
Fitzcarraldo Editions
A woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession about a brutal crime committed by Israeli soldiers during the War of 1948. The result is ‘a haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, cutting to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession’. Shibli was born in 1974 and this is her third novel.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell.
Granta
Acclaimed for her earlier collection of short stories, Things We Lost in the Fire, Mariana Enríquez returns with another helping of Argentinian gothic. The stories are seething with urban realism and horror, but also ‘tenderness toward those in pain, in fear and in limbo’.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated from Spanish by Adrian Nathan West.
Pushkin Press
Physics, chemistry and mathematics as you might never have approached them before, this genre-defying novel blends history and fiction, through science, to create a compelling work of art.
“We may be familiar with such things as Schrodinger’s cat and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle… but the sheer audacity, the utter insanity of the ideas and the thinkers who discovered these ideas have never, in my experience, been so vividly and terrifyingly conveyed as in this short, monstrous, and brilliant book” – Philip Pullman.