The shortlist for the International Booker Prize 2024 is announced

‘Interweaving the intimate and political in radically original ways’, the shortlisted books represent six countries, three continents and a wealth of voices. Find out more here

The shortlist for the International Booker Prize 2024 – the world’s most significant award for a single work of translated fiction – has been announced. The shortlisted titles, which International Booker Prize Administrator Fiammetta Rocco said ‘cast a forensic eye on divided families and divided societies, revisiting pasts both recent and distant to help make sense of the present,’ are as follows:

Not a River by Selva Almada, translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from German by Michael Hofmann

The Details by Ia Genberg, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson

Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae

What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz

The six books on the shortlist have been chosen by this year’s judging panel, chaired by esteemed writer and broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel. She is joined by award-winning poet Natalie Diaz; Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Romesh Gunesekera;  ground-breaking visual artist William Kentridge; and writer, editor and translator Aaron Robertson.

---

Eleanor Wachtel, International Booker Prize 2024 Chair of judges, says:

‘Reading is a necessary enlargement of human experience. Why be confined to one perspective, one life?  Novels carry us to places where we might never set foot and connect us with new sensations and memories. Our shortlist opens onto vast geographies of the mind, often showing lives lived against the backdrop of history or, more precisely, interweaving the intimate and the political in radically original ways. 

‘These books bear the weight of the past while at the same time engaging with current realities of racism and oppression, global violence and ecological disaster. Some seem altogether timeless in their careful and vivid accounts of the dynamics of family, love and heartbreak, trauma and grief. 

‘Hwang Sok-yong’s multi-dimensional epic tale, Mater 2-10, threads together three generations of Korean railroad workers; in Swedish author Ia Genberg’s quiet chronicle of four characters, The Details, the quotidian gains density and breadth; the story of subsistence farmers in Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow reveals a blend of magical and social realism amidst brutality in Brazil’s poorest region; Dutch novelist Jente Posthuma’s smart, compelling portrayal of sibling love and loss informs What I’d Rather Not Think About.

‘The thing about great writing is that it’s implicitly optimistic. From Selva Almada’s economical evocation of foreboding and danger in a remote corner of Argentina, Not a River, to Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck’s intense, rich drama about the entanglement of personal and national transformations during the dying years of East Germany, words have the power to make connections and inhabit other sensibilities – to illuminate.’

Read what our judges think of each title on the shortlist, and why you should read them, below.

---

The International Booker Prize 2024 ceremony will take place from 7pm BST on Tuesday, 21 May, in the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern. Highlights from the event, including the announcement of the winning book for 2024, will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ channels, presented by YouTuber Jack Edwards, the ‘internet’s resident librarian’.

But before then, if you’d like to join the conversation about this year’s International Booker Prize, sign up to the Booker Prize Book Club, or join the Reading Challenge, our self-guided reading challenge that encourages readers around the world to explore the 2024 long and shortlists, share their thoughts, and connect with fellow International Booker Prize fans. We hope to see you there!

---

What do you think of the shortlist? Which books have you read, and which are still on your TBR pile? Let us know in the comments below…