The change to the Man Booker International prize is good news for translated fiction

The reinvented award, folding in the Independent foreign fiction prize, should help raise the profile of translated books. But I hope one day the two Bookers will become one

All-embracing ... chair of judges James Naughtie with Man Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel at the 2009 award ceremony. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Daniel Hahn

Wednesday 8 July 2015  The Guardian

When this year’s Independent foreign fiction prize was won by Jenny Erpenbeck and Susan Bernofsky for the exceptional novel The End of Days, the author/translator team joined a roster of distinguished winners stretching back to 1990: writers from Latin America and Africa and Asia and Europe, translators working from Turkish, Arabic and Portuguese, from Hebrew, Vietnamese and Dutch and more. Twenty books have won the prize to date, plus another 100 or so on their accompanying 20 shortlists. Many of the best modern novels I’ve ever read are on those lists.
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