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.
The prize was previously a career honour, but changed this year to recognise a single work of fiction.
The prize money is divided evenly between the author and the book’s translator. The winner will be announced in London on May 16.
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Yan, a literature professor at Beijing’s prestigious Renmin University of China, is well known for the satire in his works.
Born in a county in Henan province, Yan was enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army in the late 1970s, and his life in the army has been reflected in his works, including Serve the People! , a controversial novella about an extramarital affair between a young soldier and the wife of a general. First published in a literature magazine, the novella was banned by Chinese censors in 2005.
Yan, a respected award-winning writer who has penned over 20 novels and short stories, has received several Chinese and international top literature awards, including the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014.
He was the first Chinese recipient of the award.
