New Delhi: The International Booker Prize winner will be announced on Monday. A total of six books shortlisted for the annual event were announced on Tuesday. The prize money of 50,000 dollar is primarily distributed between the author and the translator.
For International Booker Prize five novels, while one short story have been shortlisted this year . The shortlisted books include “Under the Eye of the Big Bird” by Hiromi Kawakami, “Perfection” by Vincenzo Latronico, “A Leopard-Skin Hat” by Anne Serre, “On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)” by Solvej Balle, and Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix.
It is important to mention that for the very first time, a Kannada book, “Heart Lamp”, written by Banu Mushtaq and translated by Deepa Bhasthi has been nominated for the Booker Prize. The book has been reported and published in Paris Review.
India’s Banu Mushtaq in race
Banu Mushtaq is a writer, activist and lawyer by profession. Her book appealed to the judges for its “witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating” style of capturing portraits of family and community tensions. There seems to be a fair chance for Indian novelist of winning the International Booker Prize for the third time for the country.
Earlier, India had won its first Booker Prize in 1997, for the “God of Small Things” , by renowed author and writer Arundhati Roy, and in 2022, it was won by Geetanjali Shree for her famous novel, ‘Tomb of Sand’.
The International Booker Prize 2025 judging panel was chaired by Max Porter, alongside Caleb Femi, Sana Goyal, Anton Hur, and Beth Orton. “Translated fiction is not an elite or rarefied cultural space requiring expert knowledge; it is the exact opposite. It is stories of every conceivable kind from everywhere, for everyone. It is a miraculous way in which we might meet one another in all our strangeness and sameness, and defy the borders erected between us,” official website of the event quoted Porter as saying.
The International Booker prize, is awarded annually to celebrate the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.
