32 books that have inspired the International Booker Prize 2023 shortlistees

Cheon Myeong-kwan, author of Whale

Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong 

I read this book so many times when I was in school! I don’t remember any other reading experience that was so powerful and overwhelming. I can’t pretend to understand how this book affected my consciousness and sensibilities, but I can’t deny this book’s literary influence on me as a fiction writer, many years later.   

Rabbit, Run by John Updike 

Before this, the books I read when I was young followed remarkable lives. Stories about adventure and romance, hardship and adversity, struggle and triumph. What I realised when I read this novel at 18 was that, for the most part, not much happens in life. And while that truth was very disappointing, it was also oddly a relief.    

Post Office by Charles Bukowski 

I was already middle-aged when I read this book for the first time. I read it at a very difficult time, personally. Chinaski, the weary protagonist, is also going through a hard time. Strangely, though, I felt happy while I was reading it. Setting aside its literary significance, it was because I felt I would be able to bear it all, no matter how difficult, if I could look at the world through Bukowski’s eyes - if I could arm myself with Bukowski’s gaze to stand up against the world - and be accompanied by alcohol, too.

Maryse Condé, author of The Gospel According to the New World

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë 

Brontë touched my heart and mind when I was a child in Guadeloupe thus proving the force and magic of literature. Consequently, I adapted it into a Caribbean setting under the title La Migration des coeurs in French and Windward Heights in English.  

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy 

For the same reasons as above.  

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe 

Because it was the first book I read on the ravages of colonisation.  

GauZ’, author of Standing Heavy

Les soleils des indépendances/The Suns of Independence by Amadou Kourouma 

Voyage au bout de la nuit/Journey to the End of the Night by Céline 

La vie devant soi/The Life Before Us by Romain Gary/Emil Ajar  

These are my fundamental fictions, the ones that pushed me to write. These three novels are alike in one thing: their reinvention of language! These authors made me understand that your mind will always revel in the beauty of language. To make the substance understood, the style matters above all. A fiction without style is a simple dissertation, destined for university libraries, not bookshops. However, the destiny of fiction is to touch everyone, without the distinction of education, in the name of language and style, in the name of beauty and delight.

Georgi Gospodinov, author of Time Shelter

The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen 

This was the first Andersen story I read on my own, and the magnifying glass of the tears through which I opened that story each time. I don’t trust writers or storytellers who haven’t cried when reading that story. Over the theme of death and childhood there. I think it influenced my writing afterwards – as well as my character Gaustine, who says, ‘There is only childhood and death, and nothing in between.’  

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann 

This work is key to Time Shelter and to the theme of time and memory in general: and Borges’ Funes the Memorious. I find Mann increasingly important, a kind of Einstein of literary and historical time.  

Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges  

With Borges’ Funes the Memorious you get the private hell of memory, though I’ve always dreamed of having such a super-memory for all perishable things, a memory of clouds and dogs at three in the afternoon. 

Guadalupe Nettel, author of Still Born

La vie devant soi/The Life Before Us by Romain Gary/Emil Ajar 

Because of its ironic and humorous way of criticising racism in French society and its beautiful description of how it feels to be a migrant child.   

Los recuerdos del porvenir/Recollections of Things to Come by Elena Garro 

Because it allowed me to see that my country is indeed a magical place.  

Suicidos ejemplares/Model Suicides by Enrique Vila-Matas 

Because it made me understand that the ‘short story’ is a major genre. 

Eva Baltasar, author of Boulder

Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda 

Death in Spring is a celebration, a wonderful bacchanalia dedicated to life, literature, the impossible, and the wild, mysterious nature of that untouchable thing we call imagination. What is untouchable? With every phrase, every comma and every full-stop, Mercè Rodoreda places it beneath your eyes and nose, warm, vibrant and unobstructed. It leaves me drunk. Sick with happiness, beauty, and passion. 

The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks by Katherine Mansfield 

If my bedroom is a monastic cell, Mansfield’s diaries rest on the bedside table like a bible. To me, Katherine Mansfield is the how. How she says what she says is the enigma of beauty. When I feel I’m not writing well, I stop writing. And I read Mansfield’s diaries. 

Metamorphoses by Ovid 

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is grounded in Greco-Roman tradition, which is in large part also my tradition. They’re a game, a poetic game that is incredibly baroque and fun, luxurious and filled with images that nourish and awaken my subconscious. Rereading Ovid means connecting with that subconscious, opening the doors to goddesses and monsters, to a natural world that is at once divine and human, bound. Ovid is inexhaustible, inspiring.