Chinese author Yan Lianke shortlisted for International Man Booker prize for The Four Books

Chinese author Yan Lianke’s The Four Books, one of the few Chinese novels to tackle the Great Famine of the 1950s and 1960s, is among six works shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker International Prize for fiction.

Also in contention for the £50,000 (HK$550,000) prize is food-themed novel The Vegetarian by South Korea’s Han Kang.

Elusive Italian author Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan tale The Story of the Lost Child and Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul-set A Strangeness in My Mind are also among the finalists for the prize.

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Pamuk is one of Turkey’s best-known authors and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006. Ferrante has topped best-seller lists around the world with her four novels of friendship and life in Naples, but her identity remains a mystery. She writes under a pseudonym and rarely gives ­interviews.

The other nominees are Angolan revolution saga A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, and Alpine tale A Whole Life by Austria’s Robert Seethaler.

Literary critic Boyd Tonkin, who chairs the judging panel, said the six finalists “will take readers both around the globe and to every frontier of fiction”.

The award is the international counterpart to Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize and is open to books published in any language that have been translated into English.