A satire of expatriate life in trendy Berlin, a tale of an antiquarian book dealer stuck in a time loop, and a fictionalized retelling of a migrant boat tragedy in the English Channel, are among the six titles that will compete for this year’s International Booker Prize, the award’s organizers announced on Tuesday.
Perhaps the highest profile title on the shortlist for the prize for fiction translated into English is Solvej Balle’s “On the Calculation of Volume: 1” about a bookseller who relives the same day over and over again.
Balle’s novel, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, was a nominee for last year’s National Book Award for translated literature, and many critics have raved about it since its release last year. Hilary Leichter, in a review for the The New York Times, said that in Balle’s hands “the time-loop narrative takes on new and stunning proportions.”
The six shortlisted titles — four of which are under 200 pages — also include Vincenzo Latronico’s “Perfection,” translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes, about an expatriate couple living in a hip Berlin neighborhood and struggling to engage with life outside their bubble. Ryan Ruby, in a review for The Times, said that “with ethnographic precision, Latronico taxonomizes the tastes, attitudes, vanities and blind spots of the people we now call digital nomads.”
Established in 2005, the International Booker Prize was originally given to an author for their life’s work, but since 2016 has been awarded to a single book translated into English and published in Britain or Ireland. It comes with prize money of 50,000 pounds, about $64,000, which the winning author and translator share equally.
Last year’s award went to Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Kairos” translated by Michael Hofmann. Previous winners have included Georgi Gospodinov’s “Time Shelter” and Han Kang’s “The Vegetarian.”
Max Porter, the author and chair of this year’s judging panel, said in a news release that the “mind-expanding” shortlist was “a vehicle for pressing and surprising conversations about humanity.” The books “don’t shut down debate, they generate it,” he added.
Along with Balle’s and Latronico’s novels, the other shortlisted titles are:
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“A Leopard-Skin Hat” by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson: a novel about the relationship between an unnamed narrator and an anguished friend. Serre told the Booker Prize’s website that she wrote the novel in a few months after the suicide of her sister. “I wanted to create a memorial to her, one that was as beautiful as possible,” Serre said.
The judges will announce a winner on May 20 during a ceremony at Tate Modern in London.
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