Scribe lands two titles on £50k International Booker shortlist

The shortlist for this year’s £50,000 International Booker Prize features two submissions from Scribe UK, with authors Hwang Sok-yong and Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Sora Kim-Russell progressing past the longlist for the first time.

Scribe’s first nomination is for Mater 2-10 by Hwang, translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae. The book centres on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high-altitude sit-in. Starting from the Japanese colonial era, the novel continues through Liberation and right up to the 21st century. Hwang and Kim-Russell were longlisted in 2019 for the novel At Dusk (Scribe).

Also from Scribe is Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About, translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey. The novel is narrated by a twin whose brother recently took his own life, as she reflects on their childhood and her brother’s search for happiness.

Joining Hwang and Posthuma on the shortlist is Jenny Erpenbeck with Kairos (Granta), translated from German by Michael Hofman. The book has been described by the judges as “a richly textured evocation of a tormented love affair in the dying years of East Germany, which shows how the weight of history impinges on our lives”. Erpenbeck was longlisted in 2018 with Go Went Gone (Portobello Books), translated by Susan Bernofsky. 

Ia Genberg’s The Details (Wildfire Books), translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson, is also in the running. The story is told through the eyes of a woman in the throes of high fever, who is suddenly struck by the urge to revisit a novel from her past. Inside the book, she finds a message from an ex-girlfriend. Genberg said: “I started just as the woman in the novel starts, in a COVID fever in April 2020, when I went to my bookshelf and picked up a random book that fell open in my hands, revealing a small inscription from the person who had given me the book 25 years earlier. At the feverish sight of these handwritten lines, I was struck by a very clear memory that played in a certain tone in my head, and from that experience, I simply started writing.”

Not a River by Selva Almada (Charco Press) makes an appearance, too. Translated from Spanish by Annie McDermott, the novel follows three men who embark on a fishing trip at their favourite spot, despite a terrible accident which took place there years ago. The men try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But – the synopsis reads – they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment puts them at odds with the inhabitants of the river, both human and otherwise.

Itamar Vieira Junior’s Crooked Plow (Verso Fiction), translated from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz, is the final novel to appear from the shortlist. The title delves into Brazil’s neglected Bahia hinterland, as two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother’s bed. Momentarily mystified by its power, they decide to taste its metal. The “shuddering violence that follows” marks their lives and “binds them together forever”. 

Lorenz said of the book: “I translated Crooked Plow over the course of three years. My first step was to get everything down in English, but the first draft of a chapter is like a shipwreck on the page. I return to it and keep returning; I tinker and fix and reassemble. Sometimes a hammer is needed, sometimes sandpaper. When things are going well, the translator can feel the energy shifting, and the mainsail fills with wind.”

The International Booker celebrates 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 £50,000 prize money will be divided equally between writer and translator (or divided equally between multiple translators). In addition, there is a prize of £5,000 for each of the shortlisted titles. 

The shortlist was chosen from a longlist of 13 titles announced in March and features novels originating from Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, South Korea and Sweden. South Korea is represented for the third year running and Argentina for the fourth time in five years.

This year’s judging panel is chaired by the writer and broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel. She is joined by award-winning poet Natalie Diaz; Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Romesh Gunesekera; visual artist William Kentridge; and writer, editor and translator Aaron Robertson. 

Wachtel said: “Our shortlist opens on to vast geographies of the mind, often showing lives lived against the backdrop of history or, more precisely, interweaving the intimate and the political in radically original ways. 

“These books bear the weight of the past while at the same time engaging with current realities of racism and oppression, global violence and ecological disaster. Some seem altogether timeless in their careful and vivid accounts of the dynamics of family, love and heartbreak, trauma and grief.”

The International Booker Prize 2024 ceremony will take place from 7pm BST on Tuesday, 21st May. It is being held for the first time in the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern. Highlights from the event, including the announcement of the winning book for 2024, will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes channels, presented by YouTuber Jack Edwards.