Writers from 4 continents up for $86K International Booker Prize for fiction

Can Xue’s I Live in the Slums and Ngugi’s The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gikuyu and Mumbi are among 13 books on the longlist this year.

The list announced Tuesday (March 30, 2021) features works from four continents, including The War of the Poor by France’s Eric Vuillard, In Memory of Memory by Russian writer Maria Stepanova, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Argentina’s Mariana Enriquez and Minor Detail by Palestinian author Adania Shibli.

125 books were submitted for consideration this year.

British writer and historian Lucy Hughes-Hallett, who heads the judging panel, said a theme of many of the books was “migration — the pain of it, but also the fruitful interconnectedness of the modern world.”

“Authors cross borders, and so do books, refusing to stay put in rigidly separated categories. We’ve read books that were like biographies, like myths, like essays, like meditations, like works of history — each one transformed into a work of fiction by the creative energy of the author’s imagination.” 

The rest of the jury is comprised of Ethiopian Canadian writer and journalist Aida Edemariam, British professor and historian Olivette Otele, Indian British writer Neel Mukherjee and Hungarian British poet and translator George Szirtes.

The six finalists are set to be revealed on April 22 and the winner on June 2.

The complete longlist is:

• I Live in the Slums by Can Xue, translated from Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping
• At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop, translated from French by Anna Mocschovakis
• The Pear Field by Nana Ekvtimishvili, translated from Georgian by Elizabeth Heighway
• The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell
• When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated from Spanish by Adrian Nathan West
• The Perfect Nine: The Epic Gikuyu and Mumbi by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, translated from Gikuyu by the author
• The Employees by Olga Ravn, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken
• Summer Brother by Jaap Robben, translated from Dutch by David Doherty
• An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky, translated from German by Jackie Smith
• Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette
• In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated from Russian by Sasha Dugdale
• Wretchedness by Andrzej Tichý, translated from Swedish by Nichola Smalley
• The War of the Poor by Éric Vuillard, translated from French by Mark Polizzotti

With files from CBC Books.