2024 International Booker Prize Shortlist Announced: NPR

Six languages. Six countries. Three continents. The novels shortlisted for this year's International Booker Prize span cultures, styles and the breadth of human experience.

“Novels take us to places we may never have set foot, and connect us with new sensations and memories,” Eleanor Wachtel, chair of the International Booker Prize 2024 jury, said in a statement. “Our shortlist opens up vast geographies of the mind, often showing lives lived against the backdrop of history, or, more precisely, intertwining the intimate and the political in radically original ways.”

Here is the shortlist for the 2024 International Booker Prize (winner will be announced on May 21):

Not a river Written by Silva Almada, translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott

Two men and their dead friend's teenage son go on a hunting trip. Frustrated after hours of wrestling with hooked stingrays, one of them shoots them with a gun. They hung her body in their camp site and left it to rot. This is how A. begins tale About masculinity, guilt, desire and an external doubt that has been called “prophetic”, “ghost-like” and “a punch in the gut”.

Kairos Written by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from German Michael Hoffman

Erpenbeck said Kairos It is “a private story about a great love and its decline, but also the story of the decline of an entire political system.” In a review for NPR, Lily Meyer said that Erpenbeck's Kairos It succeeds in “echoing and amplifying the rifts between generations, and between East and West at the same time.”

Twisted plow Written by Itamar Vieira Jr., translated from the Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz

Two sisters are surprised by the powers of the knife they found under their grandmother's bed. With magical and social realism, Vieira Junior tells the story of subsistence farmers in the poorest region of Brazil. The youngest author on the shortlist at 44 years old Twisted plow It is his first novel. The Booker Prize judges said it “speaks to the importance of remembering our history and protecting the land that sustains us.”

Mother 2-10 by Hwang Suk-young, translated from Korean by Sora Kim Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae

This is the ninth book by Hwang Suk-young to be translated into English. At 81, he is the oldest author on the shortlist. The Booker jury said Mother 2-10 “It vividly depicts the lives of ordinary Korean workers, from the Japanese colonial era, through liberation, and into the 21st century.”

What I wouldn't rather think about Written by Gente Posthuma, translated from the Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey

Narrator in What I wouldn't rather think about He is a twin whose brother recently committed suicide. Postuma He said The story is inspired by a personal experience when “the one person I thought would always be there walked out of my life.” Telegraph He praised the novel for its “absolute originality” and how Posthuma writes in a “concise, light and pointed manner.”

the details Written by La Ginberg, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson