Previous winners Han and László Krasznahorkai nominated for £50,000 award for translated fiction, on a longlist that spans Iraq to Taiwan
Former winners of the Man Booker International prize Han Kang and László Krasznahorkai will go head to head on this year’s longlist, competing with the cream of authors from around the world for the £50,000 award.
Korean novelist Han, who won the 2016 prize for her novel The Vegetarian, is longlisted this year for The White Book, a meditation on grief centred on the death of her baby sister two hours after birth. Hungarian Krasznahorkai, who is frequently tipped as a contender for the Nobel prize for literature and who won the Man Booker International in 2015, is in the running with The World Goes On, a series of stories told by an enigmatic narrator.
Chaired by the author Lisa Appignanesi, the judges considered 108 books, with their longlist of 13 titles ranging from the horror of Iraqi author Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, in which a monster roams the streets of the US-occupied city, to Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-Yi’s The Stolen Bicycle, which sees a writer embark on a quest to find both his vanished father and the titular missing bike.
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