Man Booker International Prize merges with ‘Independent’ Foreign Fiction Prize

The Man Booker International Prize has announced it will merge with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and move to an annual format, with the prize to be awarded to a single book written in a non-English language and translated into English. Previously, the prize was awarded biennially to a body of work. The new iteration of the Man Booker International Prize will see the £50,000 (A$103,705) prize money shared equally between the winning writer and translator, and each shortlisted author and translator will also receive £1000 (A$2074). Eminence grise of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Boyd Tonkin will chair the new prize. A longlist will be announced in March, followed by a shortlist in April, with the winner announced in May 2016. Submissions will be taken from publishers rather than originating from the judges and e-Council. A statement on the Man Booker website says the new prize ‘seeks not just to reward individual authors but to encourage an ecology of translation in which publishers are emboldened to cast their nets outside the familiar waters of English-language’. As previously reported by Books+Publishing, Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai won the 2015 Man Booker International Prize and German author Jenny Erpenback won the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The End of Days (translated by Susan Bernofsky, Portobello Books).

Category: International news