Olga Tokarczuk and David Grossman are in the running to win their second International Booker Prize for Fiction.
The judges have announced 13 books for this years longlist, chosen from 135 novels published in Ireland or the UK by writers of any nationality, following a record number of submissions.
The 13 longlisted works have been translated from 10 languages and originate from 12 countries across four continents.
Polish writer and activist Tokarczuk (60) won the award in 2018 for her novel Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft.
In the same year, Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature, for what the Nobel Prize described as “a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”.
Tokarczuk’s The Books Of Jacob has been longlisted for the 2022 prize. The 912-page novel is divided into seven books.
The International Booker is award each year to a single fiction book – either a novel or short story collection – and, according to the prize, “aims to encourage more publishing and reading of quality works of imagination from all over the world, and to give greater recognition to the role of translators”.
The award includes £50,000 (€59,600) prize money, which is split equally between the winning book’s author and translator.
In 2022, each shortlisted author and translator will receive £2,500 (€2,980), increased from £1,000 (€1,190) in previous years and bringing the total value of the prize to £80,000 (€95,300).
Israeli author Grossman (68) was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2017 for his work A Horse Walks Into A Bar, translated by Jessica Cohen.
He is once again in the running for the prize for his novel More Than I Love My Life, also translated from Hebrew by Cohen.
Chair of the International Booker Prize, Frank Wynne, said: “Borges famously believed that paradise would be ‘a kind of library’, and spending the past year in the company of some of the world’s great writers and their equally gifted translators has been a kind of heaven.
“From the intimate to the epic, the numinous to the profane, the books make up a passionately-debated longlist that trace a ring around the world.
“These 13 titles from 12 countries and 10 languages explore the breadth and depth of human experience, and are a testament to the power of language and literature.”
David Diop won the prize in 2021 for his novel Night All Blood Is Black, originally written in French and translated into English by Anna Moschovakis.
Following the announcement, sales of Night All Blood Is Black saw a 447 per cent increase on the week before.
Former US president Barack Obama also listed At Night All Blood Is Black on his summer reading list.
The 2022 International Booker Prize was selected by the 2022 judging panel, consisting of translator Frank Wynne, author and academic Merve Emre, writer and lawyer Petina Gappah, writer and comedian Viv Groskop, and translator and author Jeremy Tiang.
The shortlist for the International Booker Prize for Fiction will be announced on April 7th.
The announcement of the winner of the prize will follow on May 26th at a ceremony at One Marylebone in London.
