The writer Guadalupe Nettel has been nominated for the International Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in English, for her novel La hija única, translated by Rosalind Harvey. The Mexican author has been included in the first selection of nominees, which includes 13 storytellers from different parts of the world whose novels have been published in Britain or Ireland in the last year; The six finalists will be announced on April 18th and the winner on May 23rd. Guadeloupe’s Maryse Condé and Catalan’s Eva Baltasar are also in the long list announced this Tuesday.
La hija única, published in Spanish by Anagrama in 2020 and published in English by Fritzcarraldo Editions under the title Still Born, explores the “ambivalence” of motherhood in a “sensitive and surgically precise” way, according to the short description of the awards organizers in the call for entries . The novel is about three different understandings of motherhood, Lauras, Alinas and Doris, and the connections they make between them. “I was fed up with traditional happy motherhood,” the author said in a 2020 interview with EL PAÍS.
Nettel, 49 years old and born in Mexico City, is also the author of The Guest (2006), The body in which I was born (2011) and won the Herralde Prize for Después del invierno (2014). In 2013 he won the Ribera del Duero Short Narrative Award with the storybook El matrimonio de los peces rojos. She is also the director of the magazine of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. His works have been translated into more than 15 languages and his texts have been published in media such as Granta, White Review, The New York Times, La Repubblica or La Stampa and EL PAÍS.
The full list of nominees includes Catalan Eva Baltasar with Boulder; Guadeloupe’s Maryse Condé with The Gospel to the New World; the Chinese Zou Jingzhi with the ninth building; Swede Amanda Svensson with a system so great it’s blinding; the Indian Perumal Murugan with pyre; German Clemens Meyer with While We Were Dreaming; Frenchman Laurent Mauvignier with The Birthday Party; Ukrainian Andrey Kurkov, with Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv; Norwegian Vigdis Hjorth with Is Mother Dead; the Ivorian GauZ’ with Standing Heavy; Bulgarian Georgi Gospodinov with Time Shelter and South Korean Cheon Myeong-kwan with Whale.
The award recognizes the best international work of fiction translated into English and is selected from books published in the UK or Ireland between 1 May 2022 and 30 April 2023 for the author and 25,000 for the translator. The jury this year will be chaired by French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani and will consist of Uilleam Blacker, one of the leading British literary translators from Ukrainian; Tan Twan Eng, Booker-listed Malay writer; Parul Sehgal, writer and critic for The New Yorker, and Frederick Studemann, literary editor of the Financial Times.
The International Booker Prize has been awarded since 2005. Originally known as the Man Booker International Prize, it was a biennial prize for a range of works and was not required to be written in any language other than English. Among the first winners were Alice Munro, Lydia Davis and Philip Roth. In 2015, the bases were expanded to allow authors of all nationalities to participate. Since then it has been awarded annually to a single book written in another language and translated into English. Latin American authors such as Mariana Enriquez, Benjamín Labatut, Valeria Luiselli, Fernanda Melchor and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara have been among the nominees in recent years.
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