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Shortlist announced for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, including Angolan author Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Alert! The shortlist for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize has been revealed.

Six books are in contention for the prize, including Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa.

The shortlist was whittled down from a longlist of 13. Six languages are represented, with four countries – Angola, Austria, South Korea and Turkey – appearing for the first time.

Following the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, where eight out of 10 finalists had been originally published in a language other than English, the Booker Prize Foundation announced last year that the Man Booker International would in future be awarded to fiction in translation.

Each shortlisted author and translator will receive £1,000 (about R20,000) while the £50,000 (about R1-million) prize will be divided equally between the author and the translator of the winning entry.

The winner will be announced on 16 May.

2016 Man Booker International shortlist

Title (imprint) Author (nationality) Translator (nationality)

 

Press release:

Settings range from war-torn Angola to Naples terrorised by the Camorra, from the mountains of Austria to the growing sprawl of Istanbul and from metamorphosis in South Korea to allegorical transformation during the Great Famine in China.

Five of the authors have been nominated for the first time (Yan appeared on the list of finalists in 2013). The nominees include two winners of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize: Agualusa (2007) and Pamuk (1990) who also won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. It is the first appearance on a Man Booker International Prize list for writers from Angola, Austria, South Korea and Turkey.

The translators are predominantly female and of UK or US descent. The youngest are Turkish-born Londoner Ekin Oklap (27) and Deborah Smith (28) who only started learning Korean at the age of 21.

Three independent publishers, Europa Editions, Faber & Faber and Portobello Books, have made it to the shortlist. Penguin Random House has two novels through the imprints Chatto & Windus and Harvill Secker, while Pan Macmillan’s imprint Picador has the final place on the list.

Boyd Tonkin, chair of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize judging panel, comments:

This exhilarating shortlist will take readers both around the globe and to every frontier of fiction. In first-class translations that showcase that unique and precious art, these six books tell unforgettable stories from China and Angola, Austria and Turkey, Italy and South Korea. In setting, they range from a Mao-era re-education camp and a remote Alpine valley to the modern tumult and transformation of cities such as Naples and Istanbul. In form, the titles stretch from a delicate mosaic of linked lives in post-colonial Africa to a mesmerising fable of domestic abuse and revolt in booming east Asia. Our selection shows that the finest books in translation extend the boundaries not just of our world – but of the art of fiction itself. We hope that readers everywhere will share our pleasure and excitement in this shortlist.

Emmanuel Roman, CEO of Man Group, comments:

We are very proud to sponsor the newly evolved Man Booker International Prize, which recognises the hard work and creativity of both authors and translators, and celebrates talent from all over the world. The prize underscores Man Group’s charitable focus on literacy and education, as well as our commitment to excellence and entrepreneurship in our increasingly diverse and globalised business. Together with the wider charitable activities of the Booker Prize Foundation, the prize plays a very important role in promoting literary excellence on a global scale that we are honoured to support. Many congratulations to all the shortlisted authors and translators.

The list was selected from 155 books by a panel of five judges consisting of: critic and editor Boyd Tonkin; anthropologist and novelist Tahmima Anam; academic David Bellos, Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University; editor and academic Daniel Medin, who holds a comparative literature professorship at the American University of Paris (AUP); and prize-winning British poet and author Ruth Padel.