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“Stories should not protect us, stories should expose us...” Israeli author David Grossman, who received the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for his novel A Horse Walks Into a Bar (Jonathan Cape, 2017) with his translator Jessica Cohen, talks about how all stories are multilayered and some can even trap us in this 92Y video.
“Everything is untranslatable if what translation means is making something new that stays the same. But that’s not what translation is,” says Jennifer Croft in this House of SpeakEasy video about her origins as a translator and what led her to the Polish language and to work with author Olga Tokarczuk. The Man Booker Prize–winning translator is featured in “Giving Translators Their Due” in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I think it’s a brave shortlist—we’ve picked books that are daring, experimental, not at all conventional,” says Valeria Luiselli about the six books selected for the 2020 International Booker Prize shortlist in this video with fellow judges Lucie Campos, Jennifer Croft, Ted Hodgkinson, and Jeet Thayil.
“The extraordinary thing about this book is it talks of a world in transition—philosophically, politically, intellectually, socially—and that is the age that we live in now.” Bettany Hughes, chair of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, and fellow judges speak about Celestial Bodies (Sandstone Press, 2018) written by Jokha Alharthi and translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, which won this year’s award. Alharthi is the first female Omani novelist to be translated into English, and the first author from the Arabian Gulf to win the prize.
Pankaj Mishra, Maureen Freeley, Bettany Hughes, Elnathan John, and Angie Hobbs, judges for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, talk about the merits of the books shortlisted for the prize, which is awarded to both the author and translator. The six books span five languages—Arabic, French, German, Polish, and Spanish—and are written by authors from Oman, France, Germany, Poland, Colombia, and Chile.
“We have found books that have challenged our notions of what fiction is and how to imagine the world,” says Elnathan John, one of five judges on the panel for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, about the thirteen novels in contention for the prize. The list includes Celestial Bodies (Sandstone Press, 2018) by Jokha Alharthi, translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth, and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018) by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
“There are so many women who are not married, and don’t have children, out there; there are so many of us but it’s still a bit provocative to write about.” In this interview for BBC News, Dorthe Nors talks about Jane Austen, writing about women, and her novel Mirror, Shoulder, Signal (Graywolf Press, 2018), with Helena Kelly, author of the biography Jane Austen, the Secret Radical (Knopf, 2017).
“It sings, it bubbles…it would enrich anybody’s life to read it.” Tim Martin and the panel of judges for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize discuss and praise this year’s winner, Flights (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017) by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft. Tokarczuk is the first Polish writer to win the Man Booker International Prize.
Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin talks about living in Berlin and reads from her debut novel, Fever Dream (Riverhead Books, 2017), translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell. Fever Dream, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize, was the winner of the 2018 Tournament of Books beating out George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House, 2017) in the final round.
“I narrate in such a free manner that, I hope, inspires the reader.” In this interview for Louisiana Channel, Olga Tokarczuk talks about air travel and how it influenced the story structure for her most recent novel, Flights (Riverhead Books, 2018), translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft, which is longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
