French Authors Lead International Booker Prize Shortlist

A horror story about a Senegalese soldier who fought for France in World War I and a novel about a workplace working on a spaceship are the six titles nominated for this year’s International Booker Prize.

The shortlist for the world’s most prestigious award for literature translated into English was announced at an online news conference on Thursday.

Eric Vuillard, past winner of France’s Premier Book Prix Prix Goncourt, is probably the highest profile author on the shortlist.

The book, translated by Mark Polizotti, tells the story of Thomas Montzer, a 1st-century traveling priest who rebelled against the feudal class in present-day Germany. Boyd Tonkin wrote in a review of the Financial Times, “The best is that ‘Dean War of the Deaf’ is quick and inspiring.

“Night to Night All Blood is Black” by French-Senegalese author David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis, was widely acclaimed by British and American critics, among many other shortlisted titles. Diape’s work on Senegalese soldiers in trenches during World War I “takes his character to the depths of hell and allows him to thrive there,” Chigozi Obioma wrote in a review of the New York Times.

The International Booker Prize is awarded each year to the best book translated into English and published in Britain or Ireland. This is different from the well-known Booker Prize for a fictional book written in the original English, but the prize is a prize money of 50,000 or about 70,000. Authors and translators shared the prize equally.

This award has helped many English writers to become stars. Previous winners include “Evening Discomfort,” written by Dutch author Marieke Lucas Reisenwald, translated by Mitchell Hutchison, and “Flight” by Polish author Olga Tokarzuk, translated by Jennifer Croft.

With the “war of the poor” and “Night All Blood is Blit,” the shortlisted titles are:

• “Dangers in Bed,” by Argentine author Mariana Erquez, translated by Megan McDowell. Chelsea Liu wrote in a New York Times review that “a large number of these insatiable women, cracked slum dwellers and dead children – who are generally powerless – who use unholy power in this collection and do not seem interested in justifying it,” wrote Chelsea Liu in a New York Times review. .

• “Memory of Memory” by Maria Stepanova, and translated into Russian by Sasha Dugdale. In it, Stepanova digs up the dead aunt’s property and then uses it to recreate her family story. John Williams wrote in a review of The New York Times, “This is a kaleidoscopic and timeless change in the way we look at a family of Russian Jews over the centuries.”

• The book “When We Try to Explain the World” by Benjamin Labatut, a Dutch-born author who lives in Chile and writes in Spanish, considers real scientific and mathematical advances such as Albert Einstein’s Equation of General Relativity, translated by Adrian Nathan West. Destroyers do for the collection of power. It has received mixed reviews in Britain. “The bold experiment of the form’s laboratory has created a volatile compound that is a laboratory curio, not an entirely new style,” Claire Lodon wrote in the Times of London. But John Banville of The Guardian called it “ingenious, complex and seriously disturbing.”

• “The Employees” by Olga Raven, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken. It is a science fiction novel where a crew member of a spacecraft, both human and artificial, is transformed after finding a strange object on a planet called New Discovery. Danish newspapers praised the book when it was published in 2018. “Olga Ravana is a very difficult and fictional scientist who socializes and critiques science fiction,” Alexander Westerland wrote in Politican.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, who presides over the judges, said most of the titles are far from straightforward novels that contain memoirs and historical fiction. “It’s a weird and powerful thing behind the way fiction is being written at the moment – people are really pushing the boundaries,” she said.