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Wachtel, Diaz and Gunesekera named 2024 International Booker judges
Poet Natalie Diaz and novelist Romesh Gunesekera are among those judging the £50,000 International Booker Prize 2024 as the award opens for submissions.
The panel is chaired by writer and broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel and includes award-winning poet Diaz, Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Gunesekera, visual artist William Kentridge as well as writer and translator Aaron Robertson.
The panel will be looking for the best work of fiction translated into English, selected from entries published in the UK or Ireland between 1st May 2023 and 30th April 2024. Publishers are also now invited to enter their books.
The winners will receive £50,000; £25,000 goes to the author and £25,000 to the translator. There will be a prize of £5,000 for each of the shortlisted titles: £2,500 for the author and £2,500 for the translator.
This year’s winner, Time Shelter (W&N), was written by novelist and poet Georgi Gospodinov and translated by Angela Rodel. It was the first work written in Bulgarian to win the prize.
Fiammetta Rocco, administrator of the International Booker Prize, said: “As writers, poets, artists and translators, Eleanor Wachtel and the four other judges of the International Booker Prize 2024 will extend the reach of the prize still further as they examine the ways in which authors and translators from around the globe are making sense of the world we live in.”
Wachtel said: “Over more than 30 years of interviewing the very best international authors, I have come to understand the power of translators to open borders of the imagination and to create a worldwide community of readers.
"Alongside those writers who speak to us of the culture of their homelands, many of the finest voices also come from diasporic experiences, of displacement and exile. They bring us a bifocal image of the world – where they’ve come from and where they’ve landed. The translation of their work into English carries this movement forward."
She added: "Literature subverts, it questions the lines we draw between people and places, our expectations, revealing an interiority that can change everything.”
The longlist of 12 or 13 books will be announced in March 2024 and the shortlist of six books in April. The winning title will be announced at a ceremony in May.
