The shortlisted translators of the 2021 International Booker Prize in conversation with Maureen Freely.
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MAUREEN FREELY: I’d like to start by asking how, as translators, you came to these books. Martin, could I go to you first?
MARTIN AITKEN: Well, Olga Ravn’s The Employees is a book that consists of a lot of short testimonies. I was approached by an English-language magazine in Copenhagen, who asked me if I’d like to translate some of these testimonies. I did about fifteen or so, and they were duly published. Shortly after, Denise Hansen at Lolli editions – who had only published maybe two books at that point – asked me if I’d like to translate the whole thing. And, of course, I jumped at the opportunity.
MF: And Megan, how did you come to these Mariana Enríquez short stories?
MEGAN McDOWELL: The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is actually the second book of Mariana’s that I’ve translated. Here in Chile, she’s published by Diego Zúñiga, who is a friend and whose work I’ve also translated. He told me, You have to check out this writer. I did, but I also knew there were others translating Mariana so never really thought of her work as a possible project for me. But then I was offered the translation of Things We Lost in the Fire for Granta, and of course said yes. In Spanish, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed was published before Things We Lost in the Fire, back in 2009. It had a lot of success, and everybody wanted more Marianna, so whilst she was writing a giant novel we went back and worked on the short stories.
MF: So you have another big book waiting for you as well?
MM: Yes, that’s what I’ve been working on for the past year.
MF: Great. And Mark, how did you come to this book?
MARK POLIZZOTTI: The War of the Poor is the second book I’ve worked on with Éric Vuillard – the first being The Order of the Day. It was proposed to me by a publisher with wonderful taste, Other Press, and I was immediately captivated by its understated, straightforward quality, which nonetheless conveys passion and rage. That’s a very difficult balance to strike in any language. The fact that Eric was able to strike it in French made it all the more challenging for me to strike it in English. We cut our baby teeth working together on that first book – there was a lot of back and forth.
When the second book was proposed, I jumped at it. I’d liked the way we’d worked together on The Order of the Day, and the second book was again a delight. It’s very short – the manuscript was less than 100 pages – but I feel like I put more of myself into it than some 500-page translations I’ve done.
MF: The voice is really extraordinary, and The Order of the Day is such a powerful book. It doesn’t go away. I think of it every time I look at certain brands. Nate – your turn.
ADRIAN NATHAN WEST: It was a bit roundabout. I translate from German as well as Spanish, and have translated a number of Suhrkamp authors. Nora Mercurial, who handles foreign rights there, contacted me and said ‘I’ve got this Chilean writer I’m going to work with, Benjamín Labatut’. That’s unusual for them – often, they represent the rights for Eastern European writers as well as German authors, but this was Nora’s first South American writer. When We Cease to Understand the World was still a manuscript at that point, and I think they hoped they could sell it to several publishers at once, for which you often need an English translation. And so I was given the first chapter – which is fairly long, around 40 pages – and translated it. Then there was a lot of back and forth, mainly because of a sub-agent arrangement, but it eventually sold, first in Italian and in Spanish, and then, when the English publisher purchased it, they decided to have me translate it.
MF: That’s really interesting, and chimes with a lot of what I’ve experienced. I think we’re going to have to talk about indies very soon. But first, Anna, how did you come to David Diop’s All Night All Blood Is Black?
ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS: I was approached by Jeremy Davies, an editor whom I’ve known for a long time, who I associate with indie presses because of his long history with them and his present position in one, but who was at a larger press, FSG, at the time. He contacted me and said he’d thought of me immediately for this book. When he told me what it was about, I didn’t know why he’d thought of me. But when I started to read it, I did – something in the language, and the philosophical quality. I fell in love with it. I did a sample translation, which had been requested by both the press and the author, who thankfully both liked it.
MF: Thanks. And Sasha.
SASHA DUGDALE: I’ve known Maria Stepanova for a long time, and I’ve been one of her poetry translators for, I suppose, the last decade. She asked me if I would translate In Memory of Memory and I have to say, at first, I was filled with trepidation. I’m not a prose translator – I translate poetry and plays. I thought, I can’t say ‘no’ to her because she’s my friend and I love her. But everything in me was shouting No!
I started in the spirit of friendship, but also because I thought it would be something of a spiritual adventure. And I was indeed quite different by the end of the book.
MF: Can you say how?
SD: I think that there’s something about living with her very humane, rather beautiful, unsentimental, unjudgmental, but also uplifting voice that does change a person. And I hope readers find that too. As a translator, I felt it deeply. I felt enriched by Maria’s words.
MF: You’re not the only poet in our group today. And by the way, Sasha, you’re also prose translator now, whether you like it or not.
Anna – would you say that there’s something about the language in David’s work that speaks to your poetry practice?
AM: I’ve been a poet for a long time, though I’m now a prose writer too. I’ve mostly translated prose – partly because that allows it to be part of my income, and partly because, I guess, I’m a little frightened of translating poetry. But my poetry is quite prose-y and my prose it quite poetic, and I think what made Jeremy think of me was the repetition and recursion employed in the book, which I work with a lot as a poet. And also a consciously reduced vocabulary.
MF: When talking about how you all came to these books, I’ve been struck by you all loving the work and feeling close to the authors. I’m one of these very lucky translators who hasn’t had to translate a book I don’t really, really love. There’s a book that I got really angry at – the love affair went sour. But I’ve always been fortunate. Would you all always want to translate books that you love? Is it different when you translate a book you love?
MA: I’ve translated books I didn’t love, or that I wasn’t really bothered about. But when something like The Employees comes along you feel very enriched – to use Sasha’s words – and very fortunate. This book has such a profound sense of longing that I found translating it a very emotional experience. It’s a book that touched me very deeply, and I think it speaks to us even more profoundly in our present predicament – sitting at home, isolated with our work.
MF: The format is so of the workplace – you don’t have names, all the reports are in blocks. But there’s this urge to reach beyond those. It’s formally very, very interesting.
Megan – you’re in Chile, and immersed in Chilean letters and South American literature. How do you understand your role there? In other words, is the first joy searching for what you long for as a reader, rather than what you want to translate?
MM: I’ve never had to translate anything that I didn’t like. Even where it wasn’t something that I’d necessarily chosen, as a translator you live in the space of the book and develop a kind of relationship with it. Some of the relationships are a bit troubled, in that they require you to step outside your comfort zone; for me, that has a lot to do with geography. I live in Chile, I learned Spanish in Chile, and I feel more comfortable with Chilean Spanish. But Mariana is Argentine, and at this point I translate just as many Argentine writers as I do other Spanish-language authors.
What draws me specifically to Mariana is a certain horror – this Gothic element of her fiction, which was something in the very first things I ever read as a kid. I still love to watch horror movies. And when I read Mariana, there’s this coalescence of horror and genre, taken into a literary space, that brings in social issues – the horror of the past, of military dictatorships, of violence against women. It talks about the ghosts that we live within. It has a very specific Argentine context, working within this tradition of the supernatural, the fantastical. But Mariana is modernising it. And I should mention the female characters, who are not always the easiest people to love, but they’re very easy to get interested in. I love that complexity.
MF: And it’s funny – she’s making jokes you’re not supposed to laugh at.
Mark – Éric is an extraordinary author, and you are an author of many, many guises. What’s the ‘conversation’ between Éric’s books and your other work?
MP: That’s a great question. I’d like first to just jump back a little. In terms of what I like translating, it’s not really about love or hate; it’s about interest and boredom. It’s about being able to enter into the skin of the book. The ones that I really want to do are those I find myself translating in my head as I read them in French.
I’ve always recommended to translators who are starting out to translate anything they can. Back in the day, I used to do business translations, technical translations, which are great vocabulary builders. It so happened that I was working on a literary novel at that time, which used very precise technical terminology, and I realised that what I was doing with the non-literary translation was excellent training for this much more glamorous work. Similarly, writing or editing someone else’s writing gives me a perspective on the text that has helped me in my translation work. It all feeds in.
MF: And, Nate, what was your relationship like with this extraordinary author?
ANW: Well, it’s good, which is always helpful. Benjamín and I were in touch pretty early on, and we were able to email each other back and forth as things continued. I’m not the sort of person who wants to pepper a person with emails, so in general I think there was also a respectful distance.
MF: One of the things one can’t help but think when looking at this shortlist is that there isn’t a book that conforms to standard Anglophone ideas of what a novel should be. They all push at the boundaries, but of course they’re all originally from contexts in which those boundaries might not be so strict. I’d like to talk about that, starting with history and memoir. Sasha – in what “category” would In Memory of Memory be put if we didn’t have a sophisticated indie working on it?
SD: I don’t really know, and it wasn’t something I asked myself when working on the translation. Maria and I have spoken a lot in the proverbial Moscow Kitchen about the issues the book explores, and so when I came to the work I could immediately hear her voice; the chapters sounded like conversations we’d had, and it was this idea of voice by which I was guided. So the question of genre – and I’ve been asked about it a couple of times – simply never really occurred to me. Perhaps that’s because I’ve come in via poetry.
MF: Poetry is a much better place to for these things. I think because I’m first and foremost a novelist, I’m always being told Oh, that’s not the way you’re supposed to write. And it’s my romantic hope that by bringing more of the most interesting fiction from elsewhere into English we can disrupt the ideas that people seem to have in the commercial marketplace. Anna, you’re nodding.
AM: I agree with Sasha – I don’t have an interest, really, in settling on a genre. I’m coming via poetry too, and maybe I figured anything can happen in poetry – so anything should be able to happen in fiction too. But yes, I’m also always startled when “innovative writing” in English is treated in the mainstream press as if it’s something brand-new. I sometimes want to say, ‘Have you read anything written in a different language?’.
MF: I find ideas about what ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’ are almost anthropological. ‘Nonfiction’ is the most extraordinary term. Not not real?
Martin, so many of my students are writing speculative fiction, weird fiction, science fiction – whatever you want to call it. And so many of them are locked into very conventional modes, until I get to work on them. If Olga had gone to a publisher as an English-language writer – unless she’d gone to one of our special indies that had already been educated by all the books in translation they’d published – they’d say Who are the characters? Where is this spaceship? All those conventional questions. So, where does Olga place herself, as a writer of many forms?
MA: She does move around between forms and genres. But this book she’s quite proud to call a science fiction novel.
MF: Good for her.
MA: You’re thrown into the story, and you don’t know what’s going on. There are no characters as such, as you say. I’m sure that more traditionally inclined publishers would think twice about the book, and that’s where indie publishers are fantastic news for people like us, who love this kind of stuff. They’re willing to take a risk. And It’s so incredibly important to sing their praises.
MF: So talking about independent presses and how work comes to the market, Mark – you have now a very large network of publishers and people who come to you. How did that start?
MP: In my case, it was accidental. I blundered into translation when I was 17. I was in Paris and happened to find myself across a café table from a novelist whose book I had read. I had nothing better to use as an icebreaker, so I offered to translate his work, and for some reason he took me up on it. That’s how I started. A few years later, when I was in my first publishing job, I tried to get the house to publish a novel I loved, but they weren’t interested. When I then learned that another publisher had taken it on, I wrote to him and said, ‘You don’t know me, and I don’t have much of a track record, but I love this book and I’d love to translate it’, and he gave me a chance. It happens.
MF: Yes, it happens slowly but surely. Megan, did you want to come in?
MM: I don’t necessarily want to talk about my experience, because I want to talk about things that are more universal, but I do think there’s a sense of community and of activism in translation. If you want to get into translation you have to translate, obviously – but you can do other things: write reader reports, write reviews, develop networks. Nate and I both worked at Asymptote. And I think translation tends to be welcoming in that way, and embraces people doing all these things and getting a panorama of the world. I encourage my students to do that – to be good literary citizens.
MF: I think it’s important to say that to students – not just that it’s possible, but that it’s actually quite fun. I have so much more fun now that I translate as well as writing novels.
So Nate, you worked with Asymptote. Do you think of yourself as an activist?
ANW: That’s a hard question. Maybe, maybe not. I’m going to pass on that one. But I do want to say something about small presses. There’s often a sense of persistence with translation. I worked on a book with Jeremy Davies – who has already been mentioned and who is a saint of translated literature – that was just fantastic. I gave it a rave report, but it was shot down. Jeremy then went somewhere else, and now it’s coming out, and that’s wonderful. These things can take a while, but if you have the right editor they’ll eventually happen.
MF: Those personal relationships are important. I want to pass over to Sasha now, because you were talking about being very close to your author, Sasha.
SD: Yes – I’ve been working on Maria’s poetry for quite a long time, and I was quite consciously preparing the ground to get her poetic work out – getting her poems into magazine, trying to get people to consider her for festivals. It was incremental work over the years. It’s true that these things bubble along under the surface. In Memory of Memory is a remarkable book and a completely different thing, but certainly for her poetry it helped to build a certain presence.
MF: To turn to a rather precise question, what words in these books did you find hardest to translate? Were there any that were almost impossible to carry over? Mark?
MP: There’s a great momentum to Éric’s work – his book is very short, very spare, but it carries a lot of history. It has one foot in personal speculation, one foot in solid history, and, if I can put it this way, a third foot in polemic. Éric has pared his narrative down to the essentials, yet bubbling under the surface is an incredible passion. Even though the story of Thomas Müntzer happened centuries ago, what’s striking is how contemporary it all is. The German Peasants’ War happened 500 years ago, yet many of these pages could have been written about the events of today. So how to convey that superimposition between past and present, historical fact and personal passion? That was the challenge.
MF: Anna, yours is a book that’s all voice, in a way. Was that inviting, difficult, impossible?
AM: If this novel had not been a sort of stream-of-consciousness, voice-driven, poem of a novel I think I probably would have found it impossible to accept as a project – I might have struggled too much in terms of my distance. The intimacy of the voice seemed to carry the historical material, and that’s actually what made translating it possible, despite my insecurities about not knowing enough.
MF: It is an intimate voice – you could say it’s embodied, but it also takes flight, and in that sense it’s like Éric’s voice and Olga’s voice. These all feel like books that wouldn’t achieve anything near what they do if they weren’t written and translated in the (often unconventional) ways they are.
Nate, could you talk to me about the extraordinary author’s note at the end of this extraordinary book?
ANW: I suppose the idea is to throw the reader a little bit off balance, right. Like you, Maureen, the terms ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’ really interest me. How we distinguish fact and fiction is obviously rather relevant in our era of fake news. Something discussed in the psychology of narratology is that when we ‘suspend disbelief’, we process text as factual. Only when we actively intervene, and say no, do we process it as untrue. In Benjamín’s book truth and falsehood are very closely interlaced, and in a way the whole form sets out to throw things at the reader and say, you know, don’t make particular assumptions about what’s true and what’s not true, here.
MF: Thank you. And now I want to move to the audience.
AUDIENCE: Mark, how do your experiences differ when translating authors who are dead? Apologies for the morbidity.
MP: The flippant answer is: you can’t ask them questions, but they can’t interfere either. In this instance, Éric’s English allowed us to discuss certain nuances in very specific terms. The conversations we had in the margins of the text were almost as interesting as the translation work itself. When you work on a text by a dead author, you can’t ask about those subtleties. You can do the research and read the scholarship, but the kinds of questions that keep people like us awake at three o’clock in the morning can’t be answered by a biographical tome or Wikipedia page.
A: Martin, what do you find most difficult when translating from Danish into English?
MA: Well Danish is quite a lexically thin language. If you compare an English dictionary and a Danish dictionary – and of course dictionaries don’t just fall from heaven; they’re written by people – the English dictionary will be a lot fatter. That’s a constraint, I suppose. If you’re translating the Danish literally, whatever that is, it would come out pretty flat in the English. You have to work around that, and employ the resources English gives you – more lexis.
MF: My problem at the moment is verbal nouns. Very beautiful in Turkish, not so good in English. There’s a poetry question from the audience.
A: Sasha and Anna – what does your collaboration with poets look like when translating them?
AM: My experience translating poetry has come through friendship and play. There have been two cases with friends where we thought I was going to translate their work in a more-or-less straightforward way, but it turned into another kind of collaboration that doesn’t look so much like translation. You might think that translating a living poet would be a line-by-line process, and then a fixing together of those translated lines. But in my experience it’s been more like endless conversations, spinning and spiraling, swimming, and then something coming out of it.
SD: When I was translating Maria’s poetry, that was probably the closest I got to collaboration. The War of the Beasts and the Animals is a long poem about war, imperial reach, nostalgia, militarism, all in the context of the war in Donbas. I found translating that really hard until the Brexit referendum, because the language in Britain changed, the way of speaking about nation and empire changed – all in a way that resembled the Russian poem. It suddenly became not just possible but necessary to translate, because there was so much that the poem had for us as British, English-language readers. The poem borrows a lot from Russian culture, and in some cases I substituted in Anglophone references so that there was an underground, subconscious sense that this wasn’t about a “foreign place”, but about something closer to home. Collaboration was inherent to that process.
A: How much conflict is there in the literary translation world?
MM: I haven’t seen much conflict in the translation world. I think it tends to be more of a community, and a pretty supportive one. What does come to mind are the recent conversations about translating Amanda Gorman. I think those have laid bare some differences and issues among translators.
They have made me really think about my role as a translator. To say that your identity has to do with what you can translate gets at something very fundamental for us as translators, because what we have to do is place ourselves empathetically in a role defined by difference.
MF: Translation is, in my view, all about difference. There is always going to be an argument that, for instance, my practice is one of cultural imperialism, because I take non-Western literature into a Western language. I think a powerful tool readers who disagree with a process have is not to buy the book, and a powerful tool translators have is to translate it again. Translation is an act of generosity, and it’s ephemeral.
AM: It’s hard to talk briefly about any of this. But I think there are distinctions between controversy, conflict, difference, and community work. The question about identity and translation is a big and complex one, but there’s also a question about access to the role of translator. If you look at this group of us, it’s very white-presenting. There are broader problems about access and diversity that manifest in the translation world, and there are also specific problems – in terms of hidden curricula, the fact that literary translation doesn’t pay very well, etc. I do think the community at large is focusing more concertedly on both questions, or at least portions of it are. And I’m grateful, in a way, for the controversies around translating Amanda Gorman because they have forced a lot of articulations and thinking from both committed and aspiring members of the translation community.
MF: I think this is an opportunity perhaps to discuss the word ‘activism’ again – to be more visibly activist and bring in new translators who wouldn’t usually have access to the practice, and also to work together on bringing underrepresented or ignored literatures into new languages.
A: Do you have any advice for emerging or aspiring translators?
MP: If there’s one piece of advice I’d give to beginning translators – and this sounds self-evident, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard horror stories – it’s to check with the foreign publisher first. Make sure it a) hasn’t already been translated, and b), more importantly, that it’s not being translated. Otherwise, you can start on a wonderful project you’re really passionate about, and then discover that another translator has already been contracted for the project, even if it hasn’t been announced yet.
Also, jumping quickly back to something Megan said: foreign rights agents are good people to contact when starting out as a translator, because they often need sample translations for their submissions to American or British publishers. It’s a good way to get your feet wet and your name known.
ANW: I think there are people who don’t realise the level of persistence that is necessary, too. Realistically, most books don’t make money. Realistically, most publishers are receiving thousands of submissions per month – everyone’s email is online. You have to work at it.
MF: Sasha – how about with poetry? As editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, you were making a lot of poetry translation happen.
SD: I think poetry translation is very different to prose translation. It’s much lighter on its feet; you can publish a poem in a magazine in a way that you can’t a novel. There’s also no money, so you can forget that. But you can get to the practice of translating poetry much more quickly – you can meet poets and talk to them, and they’re often really happy to collaborate. Poetry translation is more mobile, somehow. You don’t need a publishing house with a publicity department and all the wheels set in motion. It goes in a magazine, people read it, and talk about it, and it changes them.
A: How do you approach reading literature in your source and target languages? Do you put more focus on one or the other?
MF: The first thing I would suggest is to stop thinking of them as sources and targets.
MM: That’s what I was going to say. One of the most important things I did when getting into translation was come to Chile. If there’s any possibility of travel, do it. I went to bookstores, talked to editors and readers and people in the literary space. I knew I was interested in contemporary literature from younger writers, so I went around and asked people about who they were. That’s how I came to Alejandro Zambra, most of whose books I’ve now translated.
So, yes, immerse yourself in the language and space you’re translating from, but keep reading in English. Something I’ve also done is ask writers whom I’m translating – if they’re alive – if they have a writer in English they feel an affinity with. If it’s Cormac McCarthy, you can spend fifteen minutes reading Cormac McCarthy before you start to translate.
ANW: I agree. People talk a lot about reading in the source language, but I feel that the diversity and breadth of your reading in your own language is very important as well. Much of our thought about language is governed by cliché. For instance, a cliché about German is that it has very long sentences and English has very long sentences. And I think – have you read Hazlitt?
MF: Thank you all. It’s been wonderful having this chat with you. When I think back on this year, I’ll think Well the pandemic wasn’t all bad, because we were able to have this kind of conversation.
Maureen Freely is an author, journalist, translator and academic, who has written seven novels, as well as non-fiction. She is professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and the director of its writing programme. Her novel Sailing through Byzantium was named as one of the best novels of 2014 in both the TLS and the Sunday Times, and she has translated five books by the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. She is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Martin Aitken has translated numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He was a finalist at the U.S. National Book Awards 2018 and received the PEN America Translation Prize 2019 for his translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love.
Sasha Dugdale is a poet, writer and translator. She has published five collections of poems with Carcanet Press, most recently Deformations in 2020. She won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016 and in 2017 she was awarded a Cholmondeley Prize for Poetry. She is former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation and is poet-in-residence at St John’s College, Cambridge (2018–2021).
Megan McDowell’s translations include books by Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriquez, Lina Meruane, and Carlos Fonseca. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Granta, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, among others. Her translations have won the English PEN Award for Writing in Translation and the Valle-Inclán prize from the Society of Authors, and have been short- or long-listed for the International Booker Prize three times. She won a 2020 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Santiago, Chile.
Anna Moschovakis is a poet, author and translator, whose works include the James Laughlin Award–winning poetry collection You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake and a novel, Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love. Her translations from the French include Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, and Bresson on Bresson.
Mark Polizzotti has translated more than fifty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, and Raymond Roussel. His translation of Éric Vuillard’s The Order of the Day was a finalist for the French-American Foundation Translation Award. A Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the recipient of a 2016 American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature, he is the author of eleven books, including Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Best Nonfiction; Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados; Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited; and Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto. He directs the publications programme at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Adrian Nathan West is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and the forthcoming Philosophy of a Visit and translator of more than twenty books from Spanish, Catalan, and German. His essays have appeared in The Baffler, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals in print and online.
The International Booker Prize is awarded annually for a single book, translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland.
The symmetrical relationship between The Booker Prize for Fiction and The International Booker Prize ensures that The Booker Prizes honour fiction and writing on a global basis.
The vital work of translators is celebrated, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the author and translator. Each shortlisted author and translator will also receive £1,000. Both novels and collections of short stories are eligible.
The 2020 winner was The Discomfort of Evening, written by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and translated by Michele Hutchison. The 2021 judging panel is chaired by cultural historian and novelist, Lucy Hughes-Hallett and consists of: journalist and writer, Aida Edemariam; Man Booker shortlisted novelist, Neel Mukherjee; Professor of the History of Slavery, Olivette Otele; and poet, translator and biographer, George Szirtes.
The 2021 International Booker Prize winner will be announced from 6pm BST 2 June 2021, in an online ceremony from Coventry Cathedral.
For the current The Booker Prize longlist and The International Booker Prize shortlist, as well as a full history of the prize including previous winners, shortlisted authors and judges visit the website: http://www.thebookerprizes.com
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