‘Mind-expanding books': International Booker prize shortlist announced
Hiromi Kawakami and Solvej Balle have made this year's International Booker prize shortlist, which for the first time is comprised entirely of books published by independent presses.
British translator Sophie Hughes has been shortlisted for her translation of Perfection, originally written in Italian by Vincenzo Latronico. This marks the fifth time Hughes has been shortlisted for the prize, making her the award's record holder for the most times shortlisted and longlisted.
On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland (Faber)
Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson (Small Axes)
Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda (Granta)
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo)
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi (And Other Stories)
A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson (Lolli)
Six author-translator teams are now in contention for the £50,000 prize, the winner of which will be announced on 20 May, with the prize money divided equally between author and translator.
Japanese writer Kawakami, best known for her novel Strange Weather in Tokyo, has been shortlisted for her novel-in-stories Under the Eye of the Big Bird, translated by Asa Yoneda. Danish writer Balle and Scottish translator Barbara J Haveland have been chosen for On the Calculation of Volume I, the first of a planned septology in which the protagonist Tara is stuck in a time loop.
'These mind-expanding books ask what might be in store for us, or how we might mourn, worship or survive', said author and judging chair Max Porter. 'They offer knotty, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes radically hopeful answers to these questions. Taken together they build a miraculous lens through which to view human experience, both the truly disturbing and the achingly beautiful.'
The shortlisted titles are slim, with four coming in at under 200 pages, including Latronico's Perfection. The novel, about a millennial expat couple living in Berlin, 'transcends its satire of 2010s hipsterdom through the depth of Latronico's sociological observations', writes Thomas McMullan in the Guardian. 'This chronicle of contemporary Berlin is strongest in its articulation of how a certain kind of globalisation dislocates us from our surroundings.'
Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson, was also selected. The book was written in three weeks, and is based on recordings from a real event in November 2021, when a dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsized in the Channel, causing the death of 27 people on board.
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A book translated from Kannada – a language spoken by tens of millions of people, primarily in the state of Karnataka in southwest India – features on the shortlist for the first time in the prize's history this year: Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. It contains 12 stories originally published between 1990 and 2023, which capture the daily lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India.
Completing the shortlist is A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson. Serre wrote the book, about a woman with severe psychological disorders, in six months after the suicide of her sister. 'I wanted to create a memorial to her', said Serre.
The other titles longlisted for this year's prize were The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan Antoon; There's a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem, translated by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert; Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter; Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary; Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton; Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles; and On a Woman's Madness by Astrid Roemer, translated by Lucy Scott.
Alongside Porter on this year's judging panel are the poet Caleb Femi, writer and Guardian critic Sana Goyal, author and translator Anton Hur, and musician Beth Orton.
Authors who have previously won the award include Han Kang, Olga Tokarczuk and Lucas Rijneveld. Last year, Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann won the prize for Kairos.
To explore all of the books on the shortlist for the International Booker prize 2025 visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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Review: Literary masterpiece may be the best book of the 21st century
Balle, a Danish writer, gained international acclaim in 1993 with her short-story collection According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind. She then effectively disappeared, retreating to a small Baltic island. Nobody heard much from her, but that was because she was working on the seven volumes of On the Calculation of Volume. If only every wrier spent nearly 30 years on their next work. What's emerged from Balle's self-imposed exile is a book which must win the International Booker Prize - for which its already shortisted - and should earn Balle the Nobel Prize. I make no apology for the gushing acclaim. This isn't hyperbole. If you don't read this, it's like living in the 1920s and not reading Fitzgerald, Woolf, Eliot, Stein or Hemingway. Balle has made herself the defining writer of this decade, and now competes as one of the greats of this century. First, ignore the title. I was recently poring over volume two in a cafe in Portugal when a friend asked me why I was reading a physics textbook. I was delighted. It gave me the opportunity to rant at length about why they must read Balle. On the Calculation of Volume, Volumes One and Two Solvej Balle (Image: unknown) As yet, I still don't understand the title and I don't really care. There's five more volumes to go, so keep me guessing, Solvej. Now to the story. One morning, bookseller Tara Selter wakes up in a Paris hotel, comes down for breakfast and notices that another guest dropped a piece of toast just as they'd done the previous morning. Soon, it seems the whole of yesterday is repeating for her. And it is. Tara is trapped in November 18. This is Groundhog Day as written by Albert Camus, Paul Auster or Milan Kundera. Tara has fallen through time. The rest of the world is unaware time has stopped: every item, creature, weather formation, every star in the sky, repeats its November 18 pattern each day. Tara, though, knows she's stuck, that the world is on a loop, yet she can do as she pleases, change her day. She's imprisoned, but also free. Initially, she returns home from her Paris trip to her partner Thomas. Each morning for months, she retells him her story: that she's trapped in time. He loves her, he believes her, but soon the repetition is destroying her. She's also began noticing some disturbing effects of her condition. Some items stay with her forever, like the money in her pocket. Other items simply vanish. She eats a can of soup but next morning it doesn't reappear. If Tara stays in one place long enough she would consume everything there, leaving nothing behind. She considers herself a 'plundering monster'. In the 21st century, isn't that what we've all become? So Tara leaves Thomas. He won't know she's gone, anyway. He'll still think she's on that Paris trip. It's as if everyone around her suffers from the amnesia of dementia. In a way, Tara no longer exists. If she spots a pretty cottage and the owners are away, Tara can move in and make it hers. It's November 18 forever, remember. But permanent November breeds winter gloom. By volume two, Tara has decided to travel through Europe, trying to build a real year for herself, with real seasons. She goes far North to experience a true winter with snow, then deep into Spain to recreate summer. Cornwall imitates spring. Germany gives her autumn. Her attempts to celebrate Christmas with her bewildered but supportive family are among the most moving scenes in the work so far. Tara is our narrator, meticulously documenting the strangeness of her isolation: 'I count the days and make notes. I do it in order to remember. Or I do it in order to hold the days together. Or perhaps I do it because the paper remembers what I say. As if I existed. As if someone were listening.' Balle is saying something very profound about modern life in this novel. The world has both broken down and speeded up; our identities are splintered; we're unmoored as a species, adrift and lost; time itself has ceased to make sense on a planet where we face oblivion at our own hand, be it by plundering the Earth or destroying ourselves through war. Our connections are broken - to family, friends and place; we are - each of us - very much on an existential plane. In a post-truth world, we are all Tara. 'I will never find the explanations I seek,' she says. 'I will only find new questions and new answers.' There's some added spice for Scottish readers. As you lose yourself in the text, you'll sometimes find yourself arrested by words like 'outwith' and 'swither' jumping off the page. Why is a Danish writer with a taste for wry philosophical speculative fiction employing words that only Scots really use? It turns out the translator is Scottish. Barbara J Haveland, who now lives in Copenhagen, has done a remarkable job. More prizes here too, please, literary world. Let's crown this great home-grown translator. I cannot emphasis enough how desperate I am for the next five volumes. Volume Two - each book is short and just rips along - closes as Tara realises she can spend her entire life trying to learn everything there is to know. Over many long, slow months she becomes an expert on ancient Rome, for example. Tara can attend university lectures wherever she likes, listening to the greatest minds discuss the most complex ideas. What hasn't occurred to Tara, though, is she could, if she wished, use what's happened to her for evil. She could kill someone and nobody would know. But would her victim return to life or disappear forever like an apple she's eaten? Balle is both a consummate and profound artist, and a writer who knows how to keep readers turning pages. Volume Two ends on a pitch-perfect cliffhanger. I just hope she doesn't need another decades-long hiatus from the world in preparation for her next masterpiece.
