The shortlist for the International Booker Prize, an award for the best translated work of fiction into English, has been announced. The prize offers £50,000, split evenly between author and translator. The winner will be announced on June 2.
The shortlist includes two books each translated from French and Spanish, and one each from Russian and Danish.
The shortlist is as follows:
- At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated from French by Anna Moschovakis (FSG)
- The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell (Hogarth)
- When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated from Spanish by Adrian Nathan West (NYRB)
- The Employees by Olga Ravn, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken (New Directions)
- In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated from Russian by Sasha Dugdale (New Directions)
- The War of the Poor by Éric Vuillard, translated from French by Mark Polizzotti (Other Press)
"Our six shortlisted books, chosen from 125 submissions, are all extraordinary, and wildly unlike each other," Lucy Hughes-Hallett, chair of the judges, said in a statement. "We have the genres of sci-fi and ghost-stories being brilliantly subverted and repurposed. We have biographical essays opening out to become blazingly imaginative testaments to the strangeness of the universe or the cruelty of human injustice. We have a hallucinatory and terrifying vision of the madness of warfare. We have a meditative journey into a family’s history that becomes a profoundly moving story about the way time eventually bears us all away."
