International Booker Longlist offers insights into how political power drives our lives

The International Booker Prize Longlist, announced on March 11, has 13 books offering unique stories that might otherwise go unnoticed, vying for the title of best fiction from around the world translated into English.

The 2024 judging panel, chaired by broadcaster and journalist Eleanor Wachtel, included internationally acclaimed SA multimedia artist William Kentridge, who said 80% of the novels he has read in his life had been translated.

The judges made their selection from 149 books originally written in 32 languages. The longlisted works are translated from Albanian, Dutch, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish, and “books that speak of courage and kindness, of the vital importance of community, and of the effects of standing up to tyranny”, according to Fiammetta Rocco, administrator of the International Booker Prize. Many of the nominees are considered to be their respective countries’ greatest living writers.

Top of my list is acclaimed Italian writer Domenico Starnone’s The House on Via Gemito (translated by Oonagh Stransky), winner of Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, Premio Strega. A work of autofiction, it is set against the vivid backdrop of 1960s Naples, and is the story of a bitter, violent railway clerk who believes he could have been a great artist and whose talent is thwarted by the demands of family life.

Lost on Me by another Italian writer, Veronica Raimo, was originally published in Italy as Niente di Vero, or “nothing is true”. It’s Raimo’s autofictional, widely acclaimed fourth novel – it sold 100,000 copies in Italy – and tells the story of a young woman growing up in Rome in a dysfunctional family who goes on to become a writer

The judges reported a second “boom” in Latin American fiction”. The first happened in the 1960s and 1970s, when a group of Latin American novelists, including Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, gained a worldwide audience. Argentinian poet Selva Almada, Venezuelan writer Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, Brazilian writer Itamar Vieira Junior and Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener are all longlisted for the 2024 prize.

History – both personal (Undiscovered) and national (The Silver Bone and Mater 2-10) – features prominently, as do oppressive and tyrannical regimes (Kairos, Simpatía and A Dictator Calls) and the shadow of colonialism.

In some cases, these narratives are influenced by personal experiences: in 1993, Hwang Sok-yong was sentenced to seven years in prison for an unauthorised trip to North Korea to promote artistic exchange between the two Koreas. Ismail Kadare worked for many years under the watchful eye of the Albanian communist regime before claiming political asylum in France in 1990. Andrey Kurkov’s work has been banned in Russia since 2014.

The inaugural winner of the prize in 2005, Albanian writer and poet Kadare, made the longlist with A Dictator Calls, translated by John Hodgson. A tale drawn from a real-life phone call between Boris Pasternak and Joseph Stalin in 1934, it’s an analysis of 13 versions of the three-minute conversation. “Each of these is an attempt to understand or justify Pasternak’s troubling, ambiguous response from a slightly different point of view,” said the judges. “The book begins with what seem like autobiographical memories of Kadare’s time as a student in Moscow, setting a tone which hovers continually between fiction and non-fiction, between what is real and what is invented. Kadare explores the tension between authoritarian politicians and creative artists – it is a quest for definitive truth where none is to be found.”

White Nights, a series of 13 interconnected stories by Polish writer Urszula Honek and translated by Kate Webster, is described as “a highly artistic study of death encapsulated in moving stories set in Poland’s Beskid Mountains region.” In a series of 13 interconnected tragedies, Honek writes about a group of people who grew up and live in the same village.

Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov’s The Silver Bone: The Kyiv Mysteries, translated by Boris Dralyuk, is set in war-torn 1919 Kyiv. The novel is “imbued with Kurkov’s sense of irony and absurdism”, said the judges.

Kairos, by Jenny Erpenbeck and translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when 19-year-old Katharina meets a married writer in his 50s named Hans. Their passionate affair takes place against the background of the collapse of Eastern Germany, its dissolution in 1989 and then examines what comes after.

Dutch writer Jente Posthuma’s What I'd Rather Not Think About, translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey, is the story of twins, brother and sister. When the brother takes his own life, the sister has to come to terms with the loss, grief and empty space left in her own life. “The author skilfully inflects tragedy with unexpected humour and provides a multifaceted look at the search for meaning in the aftermath of suicide,” the judges said.

In Ia Genberg’s The Details, translated by Kira Josefsson, the unnamed narrator spends the duration of an illness reflecting on her bygone relationships. The book is notable for Genburg’s “remarkably sharp eye about a series of messy relationships between friends, family and lovers. Using, as she says, ‘details, rather than information’, she gives us not simply the ‘residue of life presented in a combination of letters’ but an evocation of contemporary Stockholm and a moving portrait of her narrator. She has at times a melancholic eye, but her wit and liveliness constantly break through.’”

Wachtel said: “Here are voices that reflect original angles of observation. In compelling, at times lyrical modes of expression, they tell stories that give us insight into – among other things – the ways political power drives our lives.”

The shortlist of six books will be announced on April 9 2024.

The 13 titles are:

• Not a River by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott;
• Simpatía by Rodrigo Blanco Calderon, translated by Noel Hernández González and Daniel Hahn;
• Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann;
• The Details by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson;
• White Nights by Urszula Honek, translated by Kate Webster;
• Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae;
• A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, translated by John Hodgson;
• The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk;
• What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey;
• Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo, translated by Leah Janeczko;
• The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone, translated by Oonagh Stransky;
• Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated by Johnny Lorenz; and
• Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener, translated by Julia Sanches.