Former winners among 13 heavyweights selected for longlist
LONDON:Former winners of the Man Booker International prize Han Kang and László Krasznahorkai will go head to head on this year’s longlist, competing with the cream of authors from around the world for the £50,000 award.
Korean novelist Han, who won the 2016 prize for her novel The Vegetarian, is longlisted this year for The White Book.
Hungarian Krasznahorkai, who won the Man Booker International in 2015, is in the running with The World Goes On, a series of stories told by an enigmatic narrator.
The judging panel is chaired by author Lisa Appignanesi, and together with poet Michael Hofmann, authors Hari Kunzru and Helen Oyeyemi, and journalist Tim Martin, she considered a total of 108 books. The lonnglist of 13 books that will go ahead in the race are a rare display of fictional identities and themes.
The titles selected range from Iraqi author Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, in which a monster roams the streets of the US-occupied city, to Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-Yi’s The Stolen Bicycle, which sees a writer embark on a quest to find both his vanished father and the titular missing bike.
“It’s a cornucopia of a list – greats people will recognise and some newcomers,” Appignanesi said.
Other books on the longlist include two heavy hitters from Spain – Javier Cercas and Antonio Muñoz Molina – and acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck for her novel about asylum seekers Go, Went, Gone.