See the 2021 International Booker Prize shortlist

While Australia celebrated the announcement of the Stella Prize winner last night, the 2021 International Booker Prize shortlist was also announced. Six books, translated from Danish, French, Spanish and Russian and from predominantly independent publishing houses, are now in the running for the prize, which has previously gone to books from authors such as Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, Olga Tokarczuk and Han Kang.

Celebrating the finest fiction translated into English from across the globe, the International Booker Prize will see the author and translator of the winning book share £50,000 in prize money. The 2021 judging panel praised each of the books, saying ‘Revolutionary in form, in content and in point of view, the books on this year’s shortlist are all urgent, energetic and wildly original works of literature.’

The 2021 International Booker Prize winner will be announced on the 2nd of June – scroll down to see the shortlist!

At Night All Blood is Black

by David Diop, translated from French by Anna Moschovakis

Alfa diaye and Mademba Diop are two of the many Senegalese tirailleurs who fight in the Great War under the French flag. Whenever Captain Armand blows his whistle they climb out of their trenches to attack the blue-eyed enemy. But one day Mademba is mortally wounded, and without his friend, his more-than-brother, Alfa is alone amidst the savagery of the trenches, far from all he knows and holds dear. He throws himself into combat with renewed vigour, but soon he begins to scare even his own comrades in arms.

Buy it here

When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut, translated from Spanish by Adrian Nathan West

The great mathematician Alexander Grothendieck tunnels so deeply into abstraction that he tries to cut all ties with the world, terrified of the horror his discoveries might cause. Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg battle over the soul of physics after creating two equivalent yet opposed versions of quantum mechanics. Their fight will tear the very fabric of reality, revealing a world stranger than they could have ever imagined.

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The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

by Mariana Enríquez, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell

Welcome to Buenos Aires, a city thrumming with murderous intentions and morbid desires, where missing children come back from the dead and unearthed bones carry terrible curses. These brilliant, unsettling tales of revenge, witchcraft, fetishes, disappearances and urban madness spill over with women and girls whose dark inclinations will lead them over the edge.

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The Employees

by Olga Ravn, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken

The crew of the Six-Thousand Ship consists of those who were born, and those who were made. Those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike start aching for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Shopping and child-rearing. Our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory.

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In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova, translated from Russian by Sasha Dugdale

With the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century.

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The War of the Poor

by Éric Vuillard, translated from French by Mark Polizzotti

Sixteenth-century Europe: the Protestant Reformation takes on the powerful and the privileged. Peasants, the poor living in towns, who are still being promised that equality will be granted to them in heaven, begin to ask themselves: and why not equality now, here on earth? There follows a violent struggle. Out of this chaos steps Thomas Müntzer: a complex and controversial figure, who sided with neither Martin Luther, nor the Roman Catholic Church.

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Congratulations to all of the authors on the 2021 International Booker Prize Shortlist!

Find out more about the International Booker Prize here

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Olivia Fricot

Olivia Fricot (she/her) is Booktopia's Senior Content Producer and editor of the Booktopian blog. She has too many plants and not enough bookshelves, and you can usually find her reading, baking, or talking to said plants. She is pro-Oxford comma.

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