Man Booker International Prize

The longlist for the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction has just been announced, and includes a wide range of interesting and provocative titles. It's still a relatively new prize, a development of the Independent newspaper's Foreign Fiction Prize, which ran until 2015, and included authors such Haruki Marukami and Karl Ove Knausgaard among its nominees and prize winners.

When the original prize was launched, The Independent's literary editor, Boyd Tonkin, saw it as a way of tackling what he described as:

'a kind of Anglophone triumphalism [which] expects all the cultures of the world to be delivered to our doorstop already gift-wrapped into an English text. It shirks the excitement of encountering a mind, and an art, that first took shape within another language ... In the past, regular responses to the stimulus of non-Anglophone literature did much to mold British fiction itself, all the way from George Eliot's reading of German free-thinkers to Salman Rushdie's reading of Latin American "magic realists." That continuity seems to have faded of late. As the cultural horizons of many British readers have broadened, the linguistic horizons of their publishers have, oddly, narrowed.'

Twenty years ago, the percentage of books published in the UK that weren't originally written in English had fallen as low as 3%. Research indicates that the impact of the international prize, awarded annually, has been significant in broadening the range of books available and helping to bring the best international fiction to English language readers.  The prize also highlights the significance of the work literary translators do, as the £50,000 that goes to the winning novel is shared equally between the novelist and their translator. If you're interested in reading more about translation, or even thinking about working as a translator yourself, you might enjoy George Bellos's entertaining exploration of translation and the issues it raises, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? 

You can find the full Man Booker International longlist here. The shortlist will be announced on 12th April.