Today, Tuesday 9 April, the 2024 shortlist for the International Booker Prize, the world’s most significant award for a single work of translated fiction, is announced.
Featuring titles that ‘interweave the intimate and political in radically original ways’, the list introduces readers to the best novels and short story collections from around the world that have been translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.
The shortlist
- Not a River by Selva Almada, translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott
- Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from German by Michael Hofmann
- The Details by Ia Genberg, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson
- Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae
- What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey
- Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz
The 2024 shortlist features books translated from six original languages, (Dutch, German, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish from six countries (Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, South Korea and Sweden).
The judges
The six books on the shortlist have been chosen by the 2024 judging panel: broadcaster and journalist Eleanor Wachtel as chair; award-winning poet Natalie Diaz; Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Romesh Gunesekera; ground-breaking visual artist William Kentridge; and writer, editor and translator Aaron Robertson.
Eleanor Wachtel, International Booker Prize 2024 Chair of judges, says:
Reading is a necessary enlargement of human experience. Why be confined to one perspective, one life? 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 thing about great writing is that it’s implicitly optimistic. From Selva Almada’s economical evocation of foreboding and danger in a remote corner of Argentina, Not a River, to Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck’s intense, rich drama about the entanglement of personal and national transformations during the dying years of East Germany, words have the power to make connections and inhabit other sensibilities – to illuminate.
The International Booker Prize 2024 ceremony will take place from 7pm on Tuesday, 21 May. It is being held for the first time in the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern. Highlights from the event, including the announcement of the winning book for 2024, will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ channels, presented by YouTuber Jack Edwards, who is known as the ‘internet’s resident librarian’.
The prize recognises the vital work of translators with the £50,000 prize money divided equally: £25,000 for the author and £25,000 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators). In addition, there is a prize of £5,000 for each of the shortlisted titles: £2,500 for the author and £2,500 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators).
For more information, visit the Booker Prizes website.
Get involved
If you work in a library or workplace and would like to promote the shortlist, you can download a free digital pack from our shop.
What do you think of the 2024 shortlisted titles? Which have you read and what will be added to your TBR pile? Add your comments below, or click any title above to leave a review.
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Keep up with all the latest news on the Booker Prizes website.
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