Announced this week is the winner of the International Booker Prize 2024. The recipient of this year’s award is ‘Kairos’ by German writer Jenny Erpenbeck and translated by Michael Hoffman, who each take home half of the £50,000 prize money. Host Georgina Godwin speaks to the winning duo and the administrator of the prize, Fiammetta Rocco, who lifts the lid on the selection process. We also talk to Granta’s Sigrid Rausing, who reveals who is buying translated literature and what sells best. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hello, this is Meet the Writers.
I'm Georgina Godwin.
Now, there was a lovely event this week to award the 2024 International Booker Prize.
It's given annually for the finest single work of fiction from around the world, which has been translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland.
The prize celebrates the vital work of translators, with the 50,000 pound prize money divided equally between the author and the translator.
Well, this year it was won by Kairos, written by Jenny Erpenbeck and translated by Michael Hoffman.
Fiammetta Rocco is the administrator of the prize and she joins me now to tell us about the process of choosing the winners.
Fiammetta, how do you get to that point?
Well, it's a very, very long road.
We start in August, having already chosen a panel of five judges.
Publishers send in their submissions.
There are no quotas, there's no limit to what can be sent in.
You know, when we started, there was so little new translated fiction that we've just had to let it build up and build up.
It really has.
This year we had 149 books, biggest submission list ever.
So the judges read, they read in parallel.
The books come in, they're numbered, the judges read them all the time.
And the reason that they do it in that way is because unlike other prizes where the books are sometimes divided up between the judges, there's a sort of triage process with the booker.
The judges consider every book, every judge reads every book.
That's huge.