Race for the coveted honours

In the run up to assess the cream of current literary waves, the Man Booker International prize announced its ambitious longlist recently. Two previous winners compete once more in a list that is dominated by similar heavyweight writers for the 50,000 pounds award.

Korean novelist and 2016 winner of this very prize, Han Kang, is long listed once more for ‘The White Book’. Competing in the race will also be ‘The World Goes On’ by László Krasznahorkai, who is frequently tipped as a contender for the Nobel prize for literature. Krasznahorkai is also the winner of the Man Booker International in 2015.

The judging panel is chaired by author Lisa Appignanesi and together with poet Michael Hofmann, authors Hari Kunzru and Helen Oyeyemi, and journalist Tim Martin, she considered a total of 108 books. The longlist of 13 books that will go ahead in the race are a rare display of fictional identities and themes.

Two known figures from Spain – Javier Cercas and Antonio Muñoz Molina – have also made it to the longlist, alongside fellow Spanish writer Gabriela Ybarra for her debut, ‘The Dinner Guest’.

Prominent German writer Jenny Erpenbeck is nominated for her novel about African asylum seekers ‘Go, Went, Gone’ while French novelist Laurent Binet is going to be in the race with ‘The 7th Function of Language’.

The longlist also features Argentine author Ariana Harwicz's‘Die, My Love’, Austrian Christoph Ransmayr's‘The Flying Mountain’ and Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk's‘Flights’.

The Man Booker International prize aims to celebrate the "finest works of translated fiction from around the world". The prize is divided equally between the author and the translator of the winning entry.