Grossman wins Man Booker International Prize for ‘A Horse Walks into a Bar’

Israeli writer David Grossman has won this year’s Man Booker International Prize for his novel A Horse Walks into a Bar (trans by Jessica Cohen, Jonathan Cape), reports the Bookseller.

Grossman and Cohen each receive £25,000 (A$42,050), as well as a further £1000 (A$1680) for being shortlisted.

A Horse Walks into a Bar is set in a comedy club in a small town in Israel, and follows ‘a stand-up comic in crisis, and his disintegration live on stage as he exposes his own personal hell in the course of a single performance’.

The judges praised the novel as ‘an extraordinary story that soars in the hands of a master storyteller’, which has been ‘beautifully translated’ into English.

A Horse Walks into a Bar was selected from a shortlist of six books announced in April.

The Man Booker International Prize is awarded to a book translated into English. Prior to 2016, the prize was awarded biennially to a body of work.

Category: International news