Skip to main content

Small presses loom large on International Booker prize longlist

Nine of 13 nominated titles for this year’s £50,000 award for the best translated fiction come from indie publishers

Some of the smallest publishers in the UK are doing the heaviest lifting seeking out the best translated fiction, with the longlist for this year’s International Booker prize dominated by tiny presses at the expense of their wealthier rivals.

The £50,000 award, which is split evenly between writer and translator, is for the finest translated fiction from around the world, with previous winners including Korean bestseller Han Kang and Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. Settings for the 13 novels up for this year’s prize range from Iran – in Shokoofeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, narrated by the ghost of a 13-year-old girl fleeing her home after the 1979 revolution – to South Africa, in Willem Anker’s Red Dog, described by judges as “a novel of serpentine, swashbuckling sentences that capture the mounting cruelty of the colonial project”.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Vq8tkv

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs