Jokha Alharthi’s elegantly structured and taut novel tells of Oman’s coming-of-age through the prism of one family’s losses and loves
Translated by Marilyn Booth
The Man Booker International Prize 2019
- Winner
With the aid of her translator Marilyn Booth, Jokha Alharthi, the first female Omani writer to be translated into English, also became the first Arab writer to win the prize
Celestial Bodies is the story of three sisters from an Omani village who grapple in different ways with the themes of duty, pragmatism, and idealism that surround love and marriage. Booth, an American academic, hoped the win would stop readers seeing Arabic fiction as ‘a road map to the Arab world rather than first and foremost as art’. The novel shows how much Alharthi learnt while studying for a PhD in Arabic literature at Edinburgh University. Her prize win was a source of national pride and she received a heroine’s welcome at Muscat airport on her return home.
Celestial Bodies
Winner of The International Booker Prize 2019
- Translated by
- Marilyn Booth
- Published by
- Sandstone Press
Jokha Alharthi’s elegantly structured and taut novel tells of Oman’s coming-of-age through the prism of one family’s losses and loves
The shortlist
Autobiography is given a new form, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective, in Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux’s genre-bending masterpiece
By Annie Ernaux
Translated by Alison L Strayer
Marion Poschmann’s serene, playful, profoundly moving story of the transformations we seek and the ones we find along the way
Translated by Jen Calleja
Olga Tokarczuk’s subversive, entertaining neo-noir is both gripping and thought-provoking, and anything but a conventional crime novel
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Intense, intelligent and extraordinarily sensitive, Alia Trabucco Zerán’s remarkable debut presents a new way to count the cost of generational trauma
Translated by Sophie Hughes
An author is lured into a serpentine conspiracy theory in Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s gripping tale of intrigue and assassination in Colombia
Translated by Anne McLean
The longlist
The 2019 judges
The judges discuss their choice of winner
