From books about disintegrating relationships and countries to a worker’s-eye view of Korea and a story of farmers in Brazil, the selected titles engage with current realities, say the judging panel
Korean writer Hwang Sok-yong and German author Jenny Erpenbeck appear on this year’s International Booker shortlist, which features books exploring “divided families and divided societies”, according to prize administrator Fiammetta Rocco.
Hwang is shortlisted for his ninth novel translated into English, Mater 2-10, translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae. The nearly 500-page novel traces a century of Korean history through the story of three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker. In her, Maya Jaggi said it provides “a worker’s-eye view of the 20th-century history surrounding Korea’s partition”.
Erpenbeck is shortlisted for Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann, which tells the story of a relationship set against the collapse of the German Democratic Republic. While the novel is “bleak in its view of love and politics, spending time with Erpenbeck’s rigorous and uncompromising imagination is invigorating all the way to the final page,” wrote Natasha Walter in her.
Selva Almada is the fourth author from Argentina to be shortlisted since 2020, with her novel Not a River, translated by Annie McDermott. The “deceptively simple” novel about three men going fishing on a river “slowly reveals a deep sense of foreboding and memories of trauma,” said judges. Longlisted books that did not make the shortlist include A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, translated by John Hodgson; The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk; and The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone, translated by Oonagh Stransky., translated by Kira Josefsson, in which a woman bedridden with a high fever revisits books and memories from her past.
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