Nominees for the Booker Prize 2021 Announced

The final nominees for the prestigious International Booker Prize were recently announced to the world. They included books from Europe and Latin America that blur the boundaries of fiction, history and memoir as the final six contenders for the 50,000-pound ($69,000) International Booker Prize.

Contenders for the Year

The award, run alongside the Booker Prize for English-language fiction, is given annually to a work of fiction in any language that is translated into English and published in the U.K. or Ireland. The contenders often include writers who are widely read in their own languages but less known in English. Four of this year’s six shortlisted authors have never been published in English before. The shortlist for the literary award, includes “The War of the Poor,” a story of religion and revolution by France’s Eric Vuillard, Jewish-Russian family history “In Memory of Memory” by Russian writer Maria Stepanova and imaginative short-story collection “The Dangers of Smoking in Bed” by Argentina’s Mariana Enriquez.

The other finalists are war story “At Night All Blood is Black,” by France’s David Diop, science-themed story collection “When We Cease to Understand the World” by Chile’s Benjamín Labatut and futuristic workplace novel “The Employees” by Danish writer Olga Ravn.

Details about the Ceremony and Submissions

Several internationally renowned writers who were on the 13-book long list failed to make the cut, including Chinese writer Can Xue and Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o. The winner will be announced on the 2nd of June, with the prize money split between the winning book’s author and its translator.

British author Lucy Hughes-Hallett, who is chairing the panel of judges, said the list showed that some of the most exciting new writing is going on “in the borderlands” between fiction and other genres, such as history and memoir. Hughes-Hallett said, “Some of the books … came close to being historical writing and some of them were very essayistic. Some of them seemed deeply personal, almost like memoirs.” She further added, “What we concluded in the end is that this is a fantastically vital and vigorous aspect of the way fiction is being written at the moment. People are really pushing at the boundaries.”

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