The 2024 International Booker Prize Shortlist

The 2024 International Booker Prize Shortlist was announced yesterday. The award is granted annually to “the best novels and short story collections from around the globe that have been translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.”

The award places just as much importance on the translation of the work as it does the work itself, and splits the £50,000/$62,764 prize money equally between the winning book’s author and translator. The runners up each get £5,000/$6,275 to split between author and translator as well.

This year’s judges were chaired by writer Eleanor Wachtel, and included award-winning poet Natalie Diaz, Booker Prize nominated writer Romesh Gunesekera, artist William Kentridge, and writer and translator Aaron Robertson. The judges whittled down the current shortlisted six books from 13, and that number from a total of 149 books that were published in the UK or Ireland May 1, 2023-April 30, 2023.

The resulting shortlist includes books translated from Dutch, German, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish; with translators from Australia, Germany, South Korea, Sweden, the United States and the UK.

Below are the books that made the 2024 International Booker Prize Shortlist:

Not a River by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott

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

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

Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated by Johnny Lorenz

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann

The Details by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson

The International Booker Prize 2024 ceremony will take place at 2 pm EST/7 pm BST on Tuesday, May 21st. The event will be live streamed on the book prizes’ channels.

To read more about the award, visit the award page.

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.