The International Booker Project
I haven't set myself any explicit reading goals this year, but one that I'm keen to carry over from last year is an attempt to actively read more translated fiction. I did a good job of expanding my reading last year but wasn't very systemic about it, and I want to change that.
Enter the International Booker Project, as I'm referring to it. This started as a vague desire to read all of the International Booker Prize winners, but I quickly realised that there aren't actually all that many of them, because the International Booker as we know it today has only been around since 2016. Prior to that it was the Man Booker International Prize, which was a little more like the Nobel and was awarded to an author's entire body of work every two years - and that still isn't very many things for me to read.
The creation of the International Booker as we know it coincided with the wrapping-up of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, which ran from 1990 to 2015 (with a few years off for various reasons). It was subsumed into the Man Booker International Prize, and became the International Booker. What this means is that we have a mostly unbroken run of prizes being awarded to specific books from 1990 to the present day, plus a handful of prizes awarded to individual authors. That feels like a good challenge to try and get through.
Here's a quick list of all of the books I plan to read, to make it easier for me to keep track.
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (1990 - 2015)
- The White Castle - Orhan Pamuk (1990)
- Immortality - Milan Kundera (1991)
- The Death of Napoleon - Simon Leys (1992)
- The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis - José Saramago (1993)
- The Sorrow of War - Bao Ninh (1994)
- The Film Explainer - Gert Hofmann (1995)
- The Alphonse Courier Affair - Marta Morazzoni (2001)
- Austerlitz - W.G. Sebold (2002)
- The Visit of the Royal Physician - Per Olov Enquist (2003)
- Soldiers of Salamis - Javier Cercas (2004)
- Windows On The World - Frédéric Beigbeder (2005)
- Out Stealing Horses - Per Petterson (2006)
- The Book of Chameleons - José Eduardo Agualusa (2007)
- Omega Minor - Paul Verhoeghen (2008)
- The Armies - Evelio Rosero (2009)
- Broderick's Report - Philippe Claudel (2010)
- Red April - Santiago Roncagliolo (2011)
- Blooms of Darkness - Aharon Appelfeld (2012)
- The Detour - Gerbrand Bakker (2013)
- The Iraqi Christ - Hassan Blasim (2014)
- The End of Days - Jenny Erpenbeck (2015)
International Booker Prize (2016 - Present)
- The Vegetarian - Han Kang (2016)
- A Horse Walks Into A Bar - David Grossman (2017)
- Flights - Olga Tokarczuk (2018)
- Celestial Bodies - Jokha Alharthi (2019)
- The Discomfort of Evening - Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (2020)
- At Night All Blood Is Black - David Diop (2021)
- Tomb of Sand - Geetanjali Shree (2022)
- Time Shelter - Georgi Gospodinov (2023)
- Kairos - Jenny Erpenbeck (2024)
- Heart Lamp - Banu Mushtaq (2025)
The Man Booker International Prize was awarded to an author for their entire body of work rather than to an individual book, so I'm going to have to choose a book for each author. The easiest way to approach it, I think, is to pick the book they released most recently when the prize was awarded to them (although that's not always possible with authors like Chinua Achebe, in which case it seems obvious to go for their most well-known work). That makes my list for those authors look like this:
- The Blinding Order - Ismail Kadare (Prize awarded 2005, book published in English in 2005)
- Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe (Prize awarded 2007)
- Too Much Happiness - Alice Munro (Prize awarded 2009, book published 2009)
- Nemesis - Philip Roth (Prize awarded 2011, book published 2010)
- The End Of The Story - Lydia Davis (Prize awarded 2013, book published 1995)
- Seiobo There Below 0 László Krasznahorkai (Prize awarded 2015, book published in English in 2013)
I also have the vague thought that I can expand the challenge if I want to by picking other books from the shortlists each year. That might be something I choose to do if I either really love a book and want to see what the rest of the field was like that year, or if I really hate one to the point that I DNF it and decide to read something else to tick that year off my list. Jenny Erpenbeck has won both the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International Booker, so maybe I'll pick a different book from the 2024 International Booker shortlist (Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong sounds really good).
And then, of course, the 2026 International Booker longlist is announced in a few weeks. I intended to read the longlist last year and never really got started on it. I'm not going to make reading them a goal, but I'll be interested to see what's on it and may pick some up as I work through the books on this list.