2019 International Booker prize winners

The Man Booker International Prize 2019

Translator Marilyn Booth and author Jokha Alharthi

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.

By
Jokha Alharthi
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. Translated by Marilyn Booth.

The shortlist

Celestial Bodies
Prize winner

Translated by Marilyn Booth

The Remainder

Translated by Sophie Hughes

The Years

Translated by Alison L Strayer

The longlist

The 2019 judges

The judges discuss their choice of winner