The Discomfort of Evening, written by 29-year-old Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison, is declared as the winner of this year’s International Booker Prize on Wednesday. According to the Booker Prizes website, the “£50,000 prize will be split between Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and Michele Hutchison, giving both the author and translator equal recognition.”
The writer, who prefers the pronouns they and them instead of he/she and his/her, is the youngest winner of the International Booker, just a year older than the youngest Booker winner, Eleanor Catton, who was 28 when she won the 2013 prize for The Luminaries.
This year 124 books, translated from 30 languages were considered. Originally scheduled on May 19, the announcement was postponed due to the coronavirus outbreak.
The Discomfort of Evening was chosen from a shortlist of six books by a panel of five judges. Ted Hodgkinson, chair of the judging panel, announced the winner in an online ceremony livestreamed across The Booker Prizes Facebook and YouTube pages.
“The Discomfort of Evening is a tender and visceral evocation of a childhood caught between shame and salvation, and a deeply deserving winner of The 2020 International Booker Prize,” said Ted Hodgkinson.
A bestseller in the Netherlands, The Discomfort of Evening offers readers a rare vision of rural and religious life in the Netherlands. It is written in a fascinating language, which Michele Hutchison’s striking translation captures in all its wild, violent beauty.
The International Booker Prize is awarded every year for a single book that is translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. It aims to encourage publication of translated fiction from all over the world and to promote translators. Last year’s winner was Celestial Bodies by the Omani Author Jokha Alharthi, translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth.
The judging panel also includes: Lucie Campos, director of the Villa Gillet, France's centre for international writing; Man Booker International Prize-winning translator and writer Jennifer Croft; Booker Prize longlisted author Valeria Luiselli and writer, poet and musician Jeet Thayil, whose novel Narcopolis was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012.
A look at the books shortlisted for International Booker 2020:
- The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
Translated by Michele Hutchison from Dutch
Published by Faber & Faber
I asked God if he please couldn't take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. 'Amen.'
Ten-year-old Jas has a unique way of experiencing her universe: the feeling of udder ointment on her skin as protection against harsh winters; the texture of green warts, like capers, on migrating toads; the sound of 'blush words' that aren't in the Bible. But when a tragic accident ruptures the family, her curiosity warps into a vortex of increasingly disturbing fantasies - unlocking a darkness that threatens to derail them all.
- The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar
Translated by Anonymous from Farsi
Published by Europa Editions
An extraordinarily powerful and evocative literary novel set in Iran in the period immediately after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Using the lyrical magic realism style of classical Persian storytelling, Azar draws the reader deep into the heart of a family caught in the maelstrom of post-revolutionary chaos and brutality that sweeps across an ancient land and its people. The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is really an embodiment of Iranian life in constant oscillation, struggle, and play between four opposing poles: life and death; politics and religion. The sorrow residing in the depths of our joy is the product of a life between these four poles.
- The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
Translated by Iona Macintyre and Fiona Mackintosh from Spanish
Published by Charco Press
1872. The pampas of Argentina. China is a young woman eking out an existence in a remote gaucho encampment. After her no-good husband is conscripted into the army, China bolts for freedom, setting off on a wagon journey through the pampas in the company of her new-found friend Liz, a settler from Scotland. While Liz provides China with a sentimental education and schools her in the nefarious ways of the British Empire, their eyes are opened to the wonders of Argentina’s richly diverse flora and fauna, cultures and languages, as well as to the ruthless violence involved in nation-building.
This subversive retelling of Argentina’s foundational gaucho epic Martín Fierro is a celebration of the color and movement of the living world, the open road, love and sex, and the dream of lasting freedom.
- Tyll by Daniel Kehlmaan
Translated by Ross Benjamin from German
Published by Quercus
Daniel Kehlmann masterfully weaves the fates of many historical figures into this enchanting work of magical realism and adventure. This account of the seventeenth-century vagabond performer and trickster Tyll Ulenspiegel begins when he’s a scrawny boy growing up in a quiet village. When his father, a miller with a secret interest in alchemy and magic, is found out by the church, Tyll is forced to flee with the baker’s daughter, Nele. They find safety and companionship with a traveling performer, who teaches Tyll his trade. And so begins a journey of discovery and performance for Tyll, as he travels through a continent devastated by the Thirty Years’ War and encounters along the way a hangman, a fraudulent Jesuit scholar, and the exiled King Frederick and Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia.
Tyll displays Kehlmann’s remarkable narrative gifts and confirms the power of art in the face of the senseless brutality of history.
- Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
Translated by Sophie Hughes from Spanish
Published by Faber & Faber
The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse―by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals―propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.
Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence―real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more terrifying and more terrifyingly real the deeper you explore it
- The Memory Police by Yoko Ogowa
Translated by Stephen Snyder from Japanese
Published by Harvill Secker
Hat, ribbon, bird, rose. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed. When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn’t forget, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?
The Memory Police is a beautiful, haunting and provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, from one of Japan’s greatest writer.
