The shortlist for the International Booker Prize 2023 was announced earlier today. The list features six works of literature from six different originating countries – this includes Mexico, Côte d'Ivoire, and South Korea, Bulgaria, Spain, and France.
According to the International Booker Prize websire, the shortlisted works “explore the challenges of motherhood, the struggles of undocumented workers and the dangers of nostalgia.” The French-Moroccan novelist, Leïla Slimani, the chair of the International Booker Prize 2023 jury added that “These books are all bold, subversive, nicely perverse. There is something sneaky about a lot of them. I also feel that these are sensual books, where the question of the body is important.”
The long list, which came out in mid-March, featured Indian writer Perumal Murugan's Pyre, which was his original Pukkuli's English translation by Aniruddhan Vasudevan. Murugan and Vasudevan did not make it to the shortlist. Notably, the first Indian novel in translation to win the award was Geetanjali Shree's Ret Samadhi, translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, won the award in 2022.
The International Booker Prize is annually awarded to a work of fiction translated into English, and published in the U.K. or Ireland. It is a sister concern of the Booker Prize, which awards fiction written in English.
The winner is revealed on 23 May at a presentation ceremony in London. The £50,000 (approximately Rs. 49,97,720) prize money is split equally between the writer and translator of the winning work.
Here is the full shortlist:
Standing Heavy by GauZ’, translated by Frank Wynne (MacLehose)
Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey (Fitzcarraldo)
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches (And Other Stories)
Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated by Chi-Young Kim (Europa)
The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé, translated by Richard Philcox (World Editions)
