The International Booker Prize 2024 shortlist ‘interweaves the intimate and political in radically original ways’

Each year the International Booker Prize introduces readers to the best novels and short story collections from around the globe that have been translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. 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).

The six books on the shortlist have been chosen by this year’s judging panel, chaired by esteemed writer and broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel. She is joined by award-winning poet Natalie Diaz; Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Romesh Gunesekera; ground-breaking visual artist William Kentridge; and writer, editor and translator Aaron Robertson. 

The International Booker Prize 2024 ceremony will take place from 7pm BST 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 shortlist was chosen from a longlist of 13 titles announced in March, which was selected from 149 books published in the UK and/or Ireland between May 1, 2023 and April 30, 2024 and submitted to the prize by publishers.

‘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. 

‘These books bear the weight of the past while at the same time engaging with current realities of racism and oppression, global violence and ecological disaster. Some seem altogether timeless in their careful and vivid accounts of the dynamics of family, love and heartbreak, trauma and grief. 

‘Hwang Sok-yong’s multi-dimensional epic tale, Mater 2-10, threads together three generations of Korean railroad workers; in Swedish author Ia Genberg’s quiet chronicle of four characters, The Details, the quotidian gains density and breadth; the story of subsistence farmers in Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow reveals a blend of magical and social realism amidst brutality in Brazil’s poorest region; Dutch novelist Jente Posthuma’s smart, compelling portrayal of sibling love and loss informs What I’d Rather Not Think About.

‘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.’

Not a River by Selva Almada, translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott

The author said: ‘I wanted to write this story because it is also part of my own story: Not a River is inspired by the territory where I was born and raised, by the people who inhabit that land and who, in many cases, were marginalised by neoliberal policies that condemn the majority to poverty and to an absence of minimum rights such as the right to work, to education and to health. This is my humble tribute to my land: to its rivers, its animals, its trees and the people who live in it.’

The translator said: ‘The voices in Selva Almada’s novels are so distinctive and so far from my own that I have to go looking for them elsewhere. For Not a River, I read a whole stack of fishing-related books, from Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea to The River Why, David James Duncan’s genuinely wonderful account of a life spent trout-fishing in Oregon, and I also spent hours trawling (no pun intended) through fishing forums and YouTube videos.’

The judges said: ‘A deceptively simple novel about a seemingly bucolic fishing trip in Argentina which slowly reveals a deep sense of foreboding and memories of trauma. The economy and clarity of the writing hold the reader from the very beginning, while the author feels like a secure guide, taking us by the hand through dangerous terrain.’

The Details by la Genberg, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson 

The author said: ‘I started just as the woman in the novel starts, in a COVID fever in April 2020, when I went to my bookshelf and picked up a random book that fell open in my hands, revealing a small inscription from the person who had given me the book 25 years earlier. At the feverish sight of these handwritten lines, I was struck by a very clear memory that played in a certain tone in my head, and from that experience, I simply started writing.’

The translator said: ‘Ia [Genberg] builds this novel with sentences that are long and meandering, a quality that’s integral to the exploration of memory and time’s passage that makes up the humming bassline of the book. English is, of course, fond of brief, effective statements. Part of what’s fun about translation is getting to push and stretch linguistic conventions of the language you’re translating into.’

The judges said: ‘A delicately written Swedish novel that speaks to our contemporary experiences of connection and isolation and which shows how quickly people move in and out of our lives. This is a book about friendship and loss in which the narrator quickly becomes a companion to whose voice you want to continue listening until the very end.’

What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey

The author said: ‘For me, each book begins very personally, with something happening within myself. For this book, it was the emotions I experienced when the one person I thought would always be there withdrew from my life. It was as if suddenly I had no ground beneath my feet and was falling into an endless abyss. My situation was very different from the protagonist’s situation in my book – nobody died – but the feelings were similar. It was a grieving process.’

The translator said: ‘For What I’d Rather Not Think About, I was searching for a particular voice in English. It’s Gen X/elder millennial, darkly humorous, covertly anxious, a little jaded and occasionally quite oblivious. That balance can be difficult to strike. The other thing I’m always inspired by is the sound of the original text. Whether it’s poetry or fiction, I like to replicate the sound of the original Dutch wherever possible. It’s the greatest compliment when a writer says my translation sounds like theirs when they read it aloud.’

The judges said: ‘A moving portrait of the intertwining lives of Dutch twins, grappling with the complexities of identity, loss, and the unspoken bonds that define us. The book’s raw exploration of a sibling relationship, coupled with a rare authenticity in depicting the process of mourning, provides a narrative that’s both uniquely insightful and tender in its humanity.’

This is the third year running a South Korean author has been shortlisted, after Cheon Myeong-kwan (Whale, 2023) and Bora Chung (Cursed Bunny, 2022). Hwang Sok-yong (Mater 2-10) is bidding to become the second South Korean winner of the prize since Han Kang (The Vegetarian, 2016). Jente Posthuma (What I’d Rather Not Think About) is in the running to become the second Dutch winner after Lucas Rijneveld (The Discomfort of Evening, 2020). Authors from Germany, Brazil, Sweden and Argentina have never won the prize. 

Jente Posthuma is shortlisted for her second novel – her first to be translated into English. Mater 2-10 is Hwang Sok-yong’s ninth book to be translated into English. The oldest author on the shortlist, at 81, Hwang was longlisted for the prize in 2019 for At Dusk.

Selva Almada (Not a River) is the fourth author from Argentina to be shortlisted since 2020, after Claudia Piñeiro (Elena Knows, 2022), Mariana Enríquez (The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, 2021) and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (The Adventures of China Iron, 2020). Almada is the author of 10 published works since 2003, including collections of poetry and short stories.

Jenny Erpenbeck (Kairos) is the first German author to be shortlisted since 2020, when Daniel Kehlmann was shortlisted for Tyll. Kairos is Jenny Erpenbeck’s fourth novel, all of which have been translated into English. In 2015, her novel The End of Days, translated by Susan Bernofsky, won the UK’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the precursor to this prize, and in 2018 she was longlisted for the International Booker Prize for Go, Went, Gone.

Authors representing Brazil (Itamar Viera Junior) and Sweden (Ia Genberg) appear on the shortlist for the first time. 

Itamar Viera Junior – the youngest author on the list, at 44 – is shortlisted for his debut novel. While relatively unknown in the UK until recently, Crooked Plow has been translated into 25 languages and is one of the most acclaimed and commercially successful Brazilian novels of recent years. 

The Details was a bestseller in Ia Genberg’s homeland, was the winner of the August Prize – Sweden’s equivalent to the Booker Prize – and has been translated into 29 languages. 

None of this year’s translators has been shortlisted for the prize before, although Sora Kim-Russell was longlisted in 2019 for her translation of Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk. Michael Hofmann, who is shortlisted for his translation of Kairos, was a judge for the 2018 prize. 

Several of the works draw on personal experiences. Jenny Erpenbeck grew up in East Berlin and was a similar age to the young central character in Kairos when communism collapsed. In Mater 2-10, Hwang Sok-yong, born in 1943, tells the complex story of a century of Korean history, from occupation to partition. The book takes inspiration from Hwang’s own involvement in labour and pro-democracy movements and run-ins with the authorities; he spent five years in prison for breaking South Korean security rules and visiting North Korea in 1989. 

Crooked Plow, set among an Afro-Brazilian farming community in one of Brazil’s poorest regions, is informed by the 15 years Itamar Viera Junior spent working in land reform for Brazil’s federal government. Not a River is inspired by the rural Argentinian landscapes where Selva Almada was born and raised. It is, she says, a tribute to the people who inhabit the land of her youth and who were left marginalised and condemned to poverty by government policies. 

Four female and two male authors make up the shortlist, as well five female and two male translators. Since 2016, when the format of the prize changed to become an annual award for a single work, there have been 47% more female authors and translators who have been shortlisted than male.   

Five of the books on the 2024 shortlist are published by independents (Charco Press, Granta, Verso and Scribe UK), with two published by the latter (Mater 2-10 and What I’d Rather Not Think About). Since 2016, indie publishers have dominated the prize – it has only been won twice by a conglomerate, in 2017 (Jonathan Cape, PRH) and 2023 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Hachette). Of the shortlisted publishers in 2024, only Granta has won the prize before, with The Vegetarian.

A partnership with The Notting Hill Bookshop 

From 9 May to 24 May, the globally renowned The Notting Hill Bookshop in London will dedicate itself to the International Booker Prize. The shop featured in the hit film Notting Hill, which celebrates the 25th anniversary of its release on 21 May this year, has seen its sales rise exponentially since the pandemic. The shop attributes this in large part to a new wave of young customers driven by BookTok, many of whom are increasingly drawn to translated fiction.

As an established promoter of global writing, The Notting Hill Bookshop will create displays for the longlist, shortlist and winner of the International Booker Prize, as well as showcasing bespoke recommendations of great fiction in translation provided by the nominated authors and translators. A video to celebrate the partnership, featuring interviews with the team behind The Notting Hill Bookshop, will be released on the Booker Prizes and the bookshop’s social media channels at the start of May. 

Shortlist films

For the fourth time, the Booker Prizes has partnered with Sharon Horgan’s production company Merman on a series of six short films, each featuring a well-known performer reading an extract from one of the shortlisted books. The new films are directed by Charlotte Hamblin and will be released in late April on the Booker Prizes’ social media channels, and shown at the International Booker Prize 2024 ceremony in May. The films showcasing the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist were viewed over 13 million times. Previous performers have included David Harewood, Anna Friel, Aisling Bea, Caitríona Balfe, Alfred Enoch, Bel Powley, Paterson Joseph and Jarvis Cocker.

Forthcoming events

• Shortlist readings at Southbank Centre

An evening of shortlist readings on Friday, 17 May, 2024, 7.45pm in the Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, London, chaired by academic, broadcaster and former Booker Prize judge Shahidha Bari. 

• Winner event at Foyles Charing Cross Road

The first public event with the winning author and translator at Foyles Charing Cross Road, London, on Thursday, 23 May at 7pm. 

• Winner event at the Hay Festival 

The prize’s annual visit to the festival occurs at 7pm on Saturday, 27 May, when International Booker Prize judge and novelist Romesh Gunesekera and Booker Prize Foundation Chief Executive Gaby Wood will be in conversation with the winning author and translator of the International Booker Prize 2024.