Published on Submitted by The Booker Prizes on Tue, 2017-07-18 08:57
The judges for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize are announced today 18 July 2017, as submissions for the 2018 prize open.
Chaired by Lisa Appignanesi OBE, author and cultural commentator, the panel consists of: translator Michael Hofmann; novelist and essayist Hari Kunzru; critic Tim Martin; and novelist and short story writer Helen Oyeyemi.
2018 will be the third year of the evolved Man Booker International Prize, which was originally launched in 2005. The 2018 judging panel will be looking for the best work of translated fiction, selected from entries published in the UK between 1 May 2017 and 30 April 2018.
The 2017 prize was won by Israeli author, David Grossman, and his translator, Jessica Cohen, for A Horse Walks into a Bar. The £50,000 prize was split equally between author and translator. The paperback of A Horse Walks Into a Bar sold 20,000 copies in the three weeks following the winner announcement.
“This award is especially meaningful because it is an unparalleled recognition of translators,” Jessica Cohen said in her acceptance speech. “To me,” she added, “the Man Booker International Prize is about recognising works that break down walls and barriers, that fight against dehumanising other people or other peoples, and find the language to express the human experiences that we all share.”
Lisa Appignanesi, Chair of the judges for 2018, comments: “The Man Booker International is one of my great favourites amongst our panoply of prizes. I’m thrilled by the adventure of setting out to read the best of our fiction in translation - fiction that navigates foreign seas, charts different ways of life and other ways of seeing. Fiction, too, in which a conversation between writer and translator can be divined. I’m honoured to be chairing a panel of formidable writers, critics and translators and I’m anticipating our literary discussions with delight.”
Fiammetta Rocco, Administrator of the Man Booker International Prize, adds: “The judges of the 2018 Man Booker International prize are united by their love of the written word, by their curiosity about how the novel can transcend boundaries and by a deep appreciation for the creative work done by literary translators today.”
The “Man Booker Dozen” of 12 or 13 books will be announced in March 2018 and the shortlist of six books in April 2018. The winner will be announced in May 2018.
The prize is sponsored by Man Group, an active investment management firm that also sponsors the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Both prizes strive to recognise and reward the finest in contemporary literature.
About the judges
Lisa Appignanesi OBE is a prize-winning writer, novelist, cultural commentator, and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. Her non-fiction includes Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness; Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800; and Freud’s Women (with John Forrester). She is also the author of an acclaimed family memoir, Losing the Dead and nine novels, including The Memory Man and Paris Requiem. She is a visiting Professor in Literature and Medical Humanities at King’s College London and was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in recognition of her contribution to literature. She is a former President of English PEN and former Chair of the Trustees of the Freud Museum in London. Appignanesi was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2013.
Michael Hofmann is a poet, reviewer and translator from German. He writes for the LRB, The New York Times, Poetry, The TLS and elsewhere. He has published five books of poems, two essay collections, and 80-odd translations, mainly novels. Much of his translation work is of literature from the 1920s and 1930s (Gottfried Benn, Alfred Döblin, Hans Fallada, Ernst Jünger, Irmgard Keun, Franz Kafka, Erich Marie Remarque, Joseph Roth), but he has also translated contemporary writers including Durs Grünbein, Zoe Jenny, Wim Wenders and Peter Stamm. He teaches at the University of Florida.
Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men and White Tears. He was a 2008 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2016 Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. Kunzru was born in London and currently lives in New York City.
Tim Martin is a British journalist and critic of contemporary fiction. His writing on books and culture has appeared in The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Independent, The New Statesman, The Spectator, 1843, The Literary Review, Bookforum and elsewhere. He lived in Paris for five years, where he worked as a broadcaster for Radio France Internationale.
Helen Oyeyemi is the author of five novels, including White is for Witching, which won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award, and Mr Fox, which won a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2013, and was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists the same year. Her story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours was published in March 2016.
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Notes to Editors
Four Colman Getty
July 2017
