The Booker Prizes Announce the International Booker Prize 2023 longlist and Book of the Month
The International Booker Prize – the most significant award for a single work of translated fiction – is awarded annually for a novel or short story collection written originally in any language, translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. It rewards authors and translators in equal measure, and takes readers to multiple worlds beyond the anglosphere, showing how much broader the world can be.
The longlist
The selection was made from 134 books published between 1 May, 2022 and 30 April, 2023 and submitted to the prize by publishers.
The full International Booker Prize 2023 longlist is:
- Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated from Catalan by Julia Sanches
- Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan, translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim
- The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé, translated from French by Richard Philcox
- Standing Heavy by GauZ’, translated from French by Frank Wynne
- Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel
- Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund
- Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv by Andrey Kurkov, translated from Russian by Rueben Woolley
- The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier, translated from French by Daniel Levin Becker
- While We Were Dreaming by Clemens Meyer, translated from German by Katy Derbyshire
- Pyre by Perumal Murugan, translated from Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan
- Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey
- A System So Magnificent It Is Binding by Amanda Svensson, translated from Swedish by Nichola Smalley
- Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi, translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang
Find out more about the thirteen books selected here.
The judges
The 13 books on the longlist have been chosen by the 2023 judging panel: Leïla Slimani (chair), prize-winning French-Moroccan novelist; Uilleam Blacker, one of Britain’s leading literary translators from Ukrainian; Tan Twan Eng, the Booker-shortlisted Malaysian novelist; Parul Sehgal, staff writer and critic at the New Yorker; and Frederick Studemann, Literary Editor of the Financial Times.
Leïla Slimani, International Booker Prize 2023 Chair of judges, says:
“Through literature we experience the fact that we are, at the end of the day, just human beings. We cry the same. We are moved by the same things. We are all afraid, we all fall in love and we have the same emotions. And this is the point of translation, that all over the world we can understand an emotion.
What was very rewarding about this experience was reading books from all over the world, with an extraordinary variety of form and content. Each of the judges had different tastes and that is what we have tried to reflect in this list. It celebrates the variety and diversity of literary production today, the different ways in which the novel can be viewed. We wanted to give the reader the chance to discover this and to find something that will move or disturb them. The list is also a celebration of the power of language and of authors who wanted to push formal enquiry as far as possible. We wanted to celebrate literary ambition, panache, originality and of course, through this, the talent of translators who have been able to convey all of this with great skill.”
The six books shortlisted for this year’s prize will be announced by Chair of judges Leïla Slimani in the Tech Theatre at the London Book Fair at 11.00am BST on Tuesday, 18 April. There is a prize of £5,000 for each of the shortlisted titles: £2,500 for the author and £2,500 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators).
The winner will be announced at a ceremony held at Sky Garden in London on Tuesday, 23 May. The winners’ prize purse is £50,000; £25,000 for the author and £25,000 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators).
For more information, visit the Booker Prize website.
The Booker Prizes’ Book of the Month
Each month the Booker Prizes’ Book of the Month shines a spotlight on a different work of fiction from among the 600+ titles in the Booker Library, through reading guides, extracts, opinion pieces, competitions and discussions on our social channels. We will be updating this page on our website every month. Find out more here.
Get involved
Librarians and teachers we have a free promotional pack to help you celebrate the International Booker Prize available in our shop.
Have you read any of the longlisted books? Share your thoughts with us on Twitter and Instagram using #InternationalBooker2023, or click on a title above to leave a review. Find out more about the titles and why they were selected for the list with the Thirteen things to know about the 2023 longlist.
