Int’l Booker prize announces longlist to celebrate ‘ambition and panache’
One of Ukraine’s best known writers, a novelist back from the “dead”, and an author who dictated her book are among the long listed writers for this year’s International Booker prize.
The list, said French Moroccan novelist and chair of judges Leïla Slimani, “celebrates the variety and diversity of literary production today”.
The £50,000 prize is awarded annually for a novel or short story collection written originally in any language, translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. The prize money is split equally between the author and translator of the winning book.
This year’s 13-strong longlist contains three languages – Bulgarian, Catalan and Tamil – that have never appeared before. In total, the list comprises 11 languages with three writers – GauZ’, Zou Jingzhi and Amanda Svensson – whose work has appeared in English for the first time.
Maryse Condé, who is the oldest writer ever to be longlisted for the prize at the age of 86, dictated her nominated novel ‘The Gospel According to the New World’ to her husband and translator Richard Philcox, as she has a degenerative neurological disorder that makes it difficult to speak and see. Condé and Philcox are the first wife-and-husband author-translator team to be longlisted for the award.