Man Booker International Prize 2013: Meet the finalists

The list  of 10 novelists who have been nominated as the finalists for the fifth Man Booker International Prize may be quite unexpected for many. Only two of the writers, Marilynne Robinson and Aharon Appelfeld, can be said to have a wide international profile. Unlike with the Man Booker, the Man Booker International prize the judges considers a writer’s entire body of work rather than a single novel. Robinson, an Orange Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award winner is the only one of the 10 who has been nominated for this prize before. The other nominees in the book include Indian Kannada author UR Ananthamurthy, Pakistan’s Intizar Husain and Russian post modernist author Vladimir Sorokin. Here’s a look at the list of the nomination and their contributions: U R Ananthamurthy (India):  He is one of the most important representatives of the “Navya” or “New Movement” in the literature of the Kannada language, which is spoken by about 50 million people in India and elsewhere, including in Mauritius, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. [caption id=“attachment_601238” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Image from Man Booker Prize website.[/caption] The 80-year-old writer has authored five novels, one play, collection of eight short-stories, three collection of poetry, and eight essays. His works have been translated into several Indian and European languages. His work is known for its humanity and its courage in questioning cultural norms. The author is best known for his 1966 novel, Samskara. Latest to be honoured was his novel, Bharatipura, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Hindu Literary prize and for last year’s DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Aharon Appelfeld (Israel):  He writes fiction in Hebrew, although he did not learn the language until he was in his teens. Most of his work focuses on Jewish life in Europe before, during and after World War II, but it is not simple autobiography. Silence, muteness and stuttering enforce his work, most notably Badenheim 1939, and disability is often portrayed as a source of strength. At eight, the author was deported with his father to a German concentration camp, from which he escaped and hid for three years, before joining the Soviet Army in which he worked as a cook. After the war he spent several months in a displaced persons’ camp in Italy before emigrating to Palestine in 1946, two years before Israel’s independence. He met his father after a separation of 20 years–but it was so emotional he has never been able to write about it. Lydia Davis (USA):  She is best known for two contrasting accomplishments: translating from the French, to great acclaim, Marcel Proust’s complex Du Côté de Chez Swann (Swann’s Way) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and writing short stories, a number of them among the shortest stories ever written. Much of her fiction may be seen under the aspect of philosophy or poetry or short story, and even the longer creations may be as succinct as two or three pages. Davis is now a professor of creative writing at the University at Albany, the capital of New York state. Intizar Husain (Pakistan): The author of short stories and novels, he has worked as a journalist and columnist for the Pakistan Times and the Urdu daily, Firoze. A chronicler of change, Husain has written three novels and four collections of short stories that have all been translated into English. Naya Gar (The New House) paints a picture of Pakistan during the ten-year dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq. Agay Sumandar Hai (Beyond is the Sea) contrasts the spiralling urban violence of contemporary Karachi with a vision of the lost Islamic realm of al-Andalus, in modern Spain. Yan Lianke (China): Over a 30-year career, he has not only been translated and honoured abroad, he has also won two of China’s top literary awards, the Lu Xun Literary Prize and the Lao She Literary Award.  His first novel, called The Sun Goes Down in an unofficial English translation, was about two soldier-heroes who destroy their reputations and the friendship between them when they blame each other for the suicide of a young army cook. His other famous works include To Serve the People and Dream of Ding Village. Marie NDiaye (France): She began writing at the age of 12. Her first novel, Quant au Riche Avenir (Regarding the Rich Future) was published when she was 18 by Jérôme Lindon, who had been Samuel Beckett’s great champion. Rosie Carpe (2001) won the Prix Femina, and Papa Doit Manger (Daddy’s Got To Eat), a play she wrote ten years ago, was only the second play by a woman to be taken into the repertoire of the Comédie Française. Her most recent novel, translated into English as Three Strong Women and published in the summer of 2012, won France’s most respected literary prize, the Prix Goncourt in 2009. Josip Novakovich (Canada): His three short-story collections, Yolk, Salvation and Other Disasters and Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, all contain work that is darkly comic. He is known in particular for his depiction of violence, and for his writing about the Yugoslav war and its atrocities. Keith Botsford in The Republic of Letters praised him for “an economy of style and narrative that all good readers will relish.” Marilynne Robinson (USA):  Robinson has written three highly acclaimed novels: Housekeeping which won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel , the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Ambassador Book Award and the 2006 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion and was nominated for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction;  Gilead which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and Home which won the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009. She has been writer-in-residence or visiting professor at many universities, including the University of Kent, Amherst, and the University of Massachusetts’ MFA Programme for Poets & Writers. Vladimir Sorokin (Russia): He is a post-modern Russian storyteller and dramatist and one of the most popular writers in contemporary Russian literature, famous for The Ice Trilogy. His early works were banned during the Soviet period, but in 2001 he won the Russian Booker prize. His work has been translated into about 20 languages. His best known book in English is Days of the Oprichnik, which is set in Moscow in 2028, when the city has been sealed off from Europe by a Great Wall and is ruled by a latterday Ivan the Terrible, who is protected by “oprichniki”, the black-clad secret police whose main job is eliminating Ivan’s enemies. Peter Stamm (Switzerland): Stamn is a novelist, short-story writer and radio dramatist, who prefers to write in German rather than in his native Schweizerdeutsch. His cool and sparse writing style has been translated into English by Michael Hofmann. His best-known books are Unformed Landscape and, more recently, Seven Years. You can read more about the writers here.