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The shortlist for the International Booker Prize, a prestigious award for literary work translated into English, was announced on Tuesday, with six titles vying for the honour.
The shortlisted books span across time and space, from a Mandarin novel set in 1930s Taiwan to suburban France in the 1990s. Two of the books are debut novels, while two the author/translator pairs have previously been nominated for the prize.
Across the books, there is a consistent theme of control. In some way or another, all six titles follow characters as they struggle with forces more powerful than themselves and face some sort of curtailment of their freedom.
The polyphonic German novel written by Shida Bazyar and translated by Ruth Martin follows two generations of an Iranian family as they live their lives, at home and in exile, through some of the most turbulent moments in the country’s history.
In a statement to the award’s organisers, Bazyar explained, “The main thing I wanted was to understand my parents’ story. The book isn’t autobiographical, but I spent many hours interviewing my parents for research, to find out what their political life was like in Iran, what their resistance looked like, and how they ended up fleeing to Germany, where I was born.”
She Who Remains, the debut novel from Bulgarian novelist Rene Karabash and translated by Izidora Angel, is set in a remote Albanian village, closed off to the outside world and governed by ancient customs. When forced to marry against her will, she becomes a sworn virgin and a series of chaotic mishappenings drive her away from everyone she loves.
Karabash said she had known she wanted to write this story for a long time but couldn’t pin down its characters until she was at a photo exhibition on Albania’s sworn virgins. She said she spent two years researching the group and then wrote the book in two months.
Set in Nazi Germany, Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director, translated by Ross Benjamin, is the pair’s second nomination for an International Booker Prize. The book follows a fictionalised account of the life of acclaimed German film director GW Pabst. A dissident in exile, he returns to Austria — formally part of Germany after the Anschluss in 1938 — when his mother falls ill and slowly gets pulled into the German propaganda machine.
Kehlmann said using Pabst as the main character allowed him “an entrance into a dictatorship from the angle of someone returning from ‘a free country’ and learning the rules as he goes”.
Set in the depths of a Brazilian penal colony, On Earth As It Is Beneath is written by Ana Paula Maia and translated by Padma Vishvanathan. The 100-page read packs a deep, dark punch, with themes of slavery, torture and a perversion of justice.
Talking about her journey researching and writing the book, Maia said, “The more I reflected on the prison system in Brazil and other parts of the world, the more I realised that beyond the application of laws to criminals, in the end, we are all imprisoned in this world, with walls that may or may not be visible.”
Marie NDiaye’s The Witch — translated from French by Jordan Stump — follows…a witch. Well, a woman with supernatural powers who nonetheless lives an ordinary life, in an unremarkable French town, dealing with her unhappy marriage. She does pass her magical gifts on to her daughters though and they surpass her strength and sorcery ability. Much like Kehlmann and Benjamin, this is NDiaye and Stump’s second nomination.
The author said she wanted to redefine the term ‘witch’ with her book, bring it back into the public discourse. That’s why she said she created a “contemporary witch: not very confident in her gift, even a little ashamed of it, and not particularly successful in passing it down to her daughters, who, modern teenagers that they are, don’t believe in it.”
The last book on the shortlist, Yáng Shuāng-zi and Lin King’s Taiwan Travelogue follows a culinary writer on a trip through Japanese-occupied Taiwan. The book is written as the translation of a fictional memoir and has won Taiwan’s highest literary honour.
Shuāng-zi said the book was an exploration of the island’s complex history with colonialism, where Japanese occupation is not viewed as harshly as it is in South Korea. She also joked, “Research for the novel’s central themes of travel and food changed my life in two obvious ways: my savings went down; my weight went up.”
Cover photo: India Hobson for Booker Prize Foundation