Check Out These 'Wildly Original' Titles Selected for the International Booker Prize Shortlist
We hope you've been able to explore our World Literature Festival happening now with events and content that celebrates books and writers from around the world. If you enjoy global literature, check out the translated works that just made the shortlist for the 2021 Booker International Prize. The judging panel described the collection as "revolutionary in form, in content and in point of view...energetic and wildly original."
The shortlist titles were announced today and the prize winner—which recognizes the author and translator equally—will be announced on June 2. (You can find the longlist here.) The books on this year's shortlist are translated from French, Spanish, Danish, and Russian.
At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop, translated from French by by Anna Moschovakis, Pushkin Press (UK) / Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US)
Haunted for refusing to kill an injured comrade who begged to be spared an agonizing death, a World War I Chocolat soldier from Senegal begins killing enemy soldiers as penance, earning a sinister reputation along the way.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories by Mariana Enriquz, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell, Granta Books (UK) / Hogarth (US)
Written against a backdrop of the sociopolitical dynamics of contemporary Argentina, a collection by the author of Things We Lost in the Fire follows the experiences of sophisticated and macabre protagonists, from obsessed fangirls to a morally challenged neighborhood.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated from Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, Pushkin Press
When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger: these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Labatut's book thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life to the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.
The Employees by Olga Ravn, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken, Lolli Editions
The near-distant future. Millions of kilometres from Earth. The crew of the Six-Thousand Ship consists of those who were born, and those who were made. Those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike start aching for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Shopping and child-rearing. Our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory. Gradually, the crew members come to see their work in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether they can carry on as before – and what it means to be truly living.
In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated from Russian by Sasha Dugdale, Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) / New Directions Publishing Corporation (US)
With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century.
The War of the Poor by Éric Vuillard, translated from French by Mark Polizzotti, Pan Macmillan, Picador (UK) / Other Press (US)
In the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation launched an attack on privilege and the Catholic Church, but it rapidly became an established, bourgeois authority itself. Rural laborers and the urban poor, who were still being promised equality in heaven, began to question why they shouldn't have equality here and now on earth.There ensued a furious struggle between the powerful-the comfortable Protestants-and the others, the wretched. They were led by a number of theologians, one of whom has left his mark on history through his determination and sheer energy. His name was Thomas Mèuntzer, and he set Germany on fire. The War of the Poor recounts his story-that of an insurrection through the Word.
Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.
Have trouble reading standard print? Many of these titles are available in formats for patrons with print disabilities.