Shortlist Man Booker International Prize-new style announced

José Eduardo Agualusa, Elena Ferrante, Han Kang, Orhan Pamuk, Robert Seethaler and Yan Lianke have a chance to win the Man Booker International Prize 2016. The shortlist of six authors and titles was announced today. And, coincidence or not, we already interviewed one of the major contenders. Read here that interview with José Eduardo Agualusa, take in what he says about writing in a dictatorship: 'I write a lot about evil, because it is so difficult to understand.'

The Man Booker International Prize is considered one of the most prestigious prizes in the world and will be awarded on 16 May. The winning book is awarded a cash prize of fifty thousand pounds, to be divided between the writer and the translator who translated the novel into English. The Man Booker International Prize is the international version of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, which is intended for writers within the British Commonwealth and Ireland.

Last year, the prize was won by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai. As of this year, the Man Booker International Prize is no longer a biennial award for an author and his entire body of work, but an annual award for a book translated into English and published in Britain.

Other contenders for this Man Booker International new style are, besides José Eduardo Agualusa from Angola/Portugal with his novel A General Theory of Oblivion, Italy's Elene Ferrante with The Story of the Lost Child; Han Kang from South Korea with the novel The Vegetarian; Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk with the novel A Strangeness in My Mind; A Whole Life by Austrian author Robert Seethaler; and The Four Books By Chinese writer Yan Lianke.

The novels of Agualusa (A general theory of forgetting, Koppernik), Kang (The vegetarian, Nijgh & Van Ditmar) and Seethaler (A whole life, De Bezige Bij) have already been published in Dutch. That strangeness in my head by Orhan Pamuk will be published by De Bezige Bij next week, and Elena Ferrante's novel, number four in her Neapolitan novel series, will be published in October under the title The story of the lost child (World Library). Nothing by Yan Lianke has yet been translated into Dutch.

Read here That interview with José Eduardo Agualusa