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The International Booker Prize 2023 longlist announced

Today, 14 March 2023, the longlist for the International Booker Prize 2023 is announced and features work from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. It includes:

  • “The oldest writer ever to be longlisted for the prize, with a gap of 54 years between the oldest and youngest nominees”
  • “Three writers who appear in English for the first time”
  • “Works originating in 12 countries and translated from 11 languages – including first nominations for books originally written in Bulgarian, Catalan and Tamil”
  • “A wife and husband author-translator team”
  • “One of Ukraine’s best-known writers”
  • “A film director, four poets, two former security guards, and a writer who has come back from the dead”
  • “Elements of Korean fairy tale, French horror, Caribbean gospel, Indian melodrama, Scandinavian saga — and East Germany’s answer to Trainspotting”

The longlist

The International Booker Prize – the most significant award for a single work of translated fiction – is awarded annually for a novel or short story collection written originally in any language, translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. It rewards authors and translators in equal measure, and takes readers to multiple worlds beyond the anglosphere, showing how much broader the world can be.

The selection was made from 134 books published between 1 May, 2022 and 30 April, 2023 and submitted to the prize by publishers.

The full International Booker Prize 2023 longlist is:

Find out more about the thirteen books selected here.

The judges

The 13 books on the longlist have been chosen by the 2023 judging panel: Leïla Slimani (chair), prize-winning French-Moroccan novelist; Uilleam Blacker, one of Britain’s leading literary translators from Ukrainian; Tan Twan Eng, the Booker-shortlisted Malaysian novelist; Parul Sehgal, staff writer and critic at the New Yorker; and Frederick Studemann, Literary Editor of the Financial Times.

Leïla Slimani, International Booker Prize 2023 Chair of judges, says:

“Through literature we experience the fact that we are, at the end of the day, just human beings. We cry the same. We are moved by the same things. We are all afraid, we all fall in love and we have the same emotions. And this is the point of translation, that all over the world we can understand an emotion.

What was very rewarding about this experience was reading books from all over the world, with an extraordinary variety of form and content. Each of the judges had different tastes and that is what we have tried to reflect in this list. It celebrates the variety and diversity of literary production today, the different ways in which the novel can be viewed. We wanted to give the reader the chance to discover this and to find something that will move or disturb them. The list is also a celebration of the power of language and of authors who wanted to push formal enquiry as far as possible. We wanted to celebrate literary ambition, panache, originality and of course, through this, the talent of translators who have been able to convey all of this with great skill.’’

The six books shortlisted for this year’s prize will be announced by Chair of judges Leïla Slimani in the Tech Theatre at the London Book Fair at 11.00am BST on Tuesday, 18 April. There is a prize of £5,000 for each of the shortlisted titles: £2,500 for the author and £2,500 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators).

The winner will be announced at a ceremony held at Sky Garden in London on Tuesday, 23 May. The winners’ prize purse is £50,000; £25,000 for the author and £25,000 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators).

For more information, visit the Booker Prize website.

Get involved

Librarians and teachers we have a free promotional pack to help you celebrate the International Booker Prize available in our shop.

Have you read any of the longlisted books? Share your thoughts with us on Twitter and Instagram using #InternationalBooker2023, or click on a title above to leave a review. Find out more about the titles and why they were selected for the list with the Thirteen things to know about the 2023 longlist.

The Booker Prizes’ Book of the Month

Each month the Booker Prizes’ Book of the Month shines a spotlight on a different work of fiction from among the 600+ titles in the Booker Library, through reading guides, extracts, opinion pieces, competitions and discussions on our social channels. We will be updating this page on our website every month. Find out more here.

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