The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 36: Announcing the International Booker Prize 2024 longlist

It’s a big week in the literary calendar (if we do say so ourselves), as we’ve just announced this year’s International Booker Prize longlist. Hot on the heels of that announcement, our host James Walton is joined by Fiammetta Rocco, the administrator of the International Booker Prize, and Eleanor Wachtel, chair of the 2024 judging panel. Listen in as they discuss the prize, this year’s longlisted books and why translated fiction matters.

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

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James Walton:

Hello and a very warm welcome to The Booker Prize podcast with me, James Walton. No Jo Hamya this week, I’m afraid, as she’s submitting a PhD rather impressively. So we wish her well with that and my apologies to all the Jo fans out there. The good news though is that it’s not just me here today because I’m joined by two very special guests in our swanky new studio to talk about the recently announced International Booker Prize longlist for 2024.

As you may know, the International Booker Prize is The Booker Prize’s sister award for the best fiction from anywhere in the whole world that’s been translated into English with the £50,000 prize shared between the author and the translator. Last year’s winners, for example, were Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel for Time Shelter, the first Bulgarian novel to win. And Jo and I much enjoyed interviewing them for a Booker Prize podcast last December that I recommend to our listeners.

So let me introduce you to those special guests I mentioned, and first Fiammetta Rocco, who’s the administrator of the International Booker Prize. And when she’s not doing that, senior editor for The Economist. Also without wishing to let daylight in upon magic, she’s also been very helpful in supplying background information to Jo and me when we’ve discussed such International Booker books as Han Kang’s, The Vegetarian Eva Baltasar’s Boulder with a U, and The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. So hi, Fiammetta, welcome to you. Lovely to have you with us.

Fiammetta Rocco:

Thank you.

James Walton:

And with Fiammetta is the chair of this year’s International Booker Prize judges, Eleanor Wachtel, a writer and broadcaster who, for 33 years, was the host of Writers and Company on Canada’s CBC Radio, where she interviewed pretty much every writer of recent decades, including I believe, 40 Nobel Prize winners. As you can see, if you go onto Writers and Company website, although in my experience if you do start diving into her interviews there, you may be some time.

Julian Barnes has called Eleanor, “The best interviewer around, and I’ve known many.” And I’ll spare her blushes and save quite a lot of time by not quoting all the authors who’ve said pretty much the same thing. This is an opinion also shared by John Le Carre, Jonathan Franzen, Kazuo Ishiguro, and many others. So welcome to you Eleanor. Are you ready for the interviewing boot to be on the other foot?

Eleanor Wachtel:

No, thank you very much for that introduction, but no, I’d like to be on your side of the table.

James Walton:

I’ve even got a bigger chair than… But anyway, let’s start with you actually, Fiammetta. Before we get to this year’s longlist, can you say just a bit about the prize itself when it started, how it’s evolved over the years, how it works now, that sort of thing?

Fiammetta Rocco:

So the International Booker Prize started in 2005, so it’s almost 20 years old, and it started as a prize for a body of work. It was awarded every two years to a writer who had made a contribution to world literature. Winner could be someone who wrote in English or someone whose work was translated into English, so there was a bit of apples and oranges about it and then in 2016, the rules were changed.

The Booker Prize for fiction is given for a single book written in English from anywhere in the world as long as it’s published in Britain or in Ireland. So it made sense then for the international prize to start being awarded also for a single book, but this time written in another language and translated into English. So the two prizes together really offer the English-speaking world, English-speaking readers a snapshot of the very best fiction that’s coming out around the globe at any given moment.

James Walton:

And since that change of policy from a body of work into a single novel, there’s been quite an array of nationalities that have won, haven’t there?

Fiammetta Rocco:

There certainly has. We’ve had something like almost 1,200 books submitted.

James Walton:

And as I say, the prize rewards authors and translators equally. Presumably this must make you pretty popular with translators because they often beaver away without getting much credit or recognition.

Fiammetta Rocco:

You’re absolutely right and I think that’s one of the most important things about it, because translators don’t just use a dictionary to choose individual words in another language. They really, in a way, create whole new work and as you say, they’re often underpaid, they’re under recognised, so sharing the International Booker Prize equally is a very important way of recognising just how important translators are.

James Walton:

Translated fiction is increasingly popular I believe, especially among young people, is that true?

Fiammetta Rocco:

There’s something really quite surprising about this. In Britain, a novel written in English is usually bought by a woman of 64.

James Walton:

Well, she must have a lot of books.

Fiammetta Rocco:

I’m one of them definitely. Things are really different with fiction and translation. Two million copies sold in the last year, half of them bought by people under 35 and that equally divided between men and women, and surprisingly, the most popular languages today are Japanese, followed by Korean.

James Walton:

Presumably, it’s the International Booker Prize, but no, for this increase in popularity?

Fiammetta Rocco:

I don’t think we really know for sure. Something’s happening, but we’re not quite sure what it is. I can think of two things. One is that culture generally is much more porous perhaps than it once was. So fans of K-pop or Korean cinema for example will move quite naturally into reading Korean novels, for example, and then I think in both those countries, Japan and Korea, there is a very gifted, very interesting generation of young writers, particularly women who are concentrating on universal things and that has really caught the attention of readers on the other side of the world.

James Walton:

Let’s imagine that one of the reasons for the increasing popularity of translated fiction is the International Booker Prize. I’ll spare you blushes there, Fiammetta, but presumably that’s the idea of the prize is to introduce these novels to readers. It’s a prize for readers.

Fiammetta Rocco:

Well, I think you’re right and I think the real winner of the International Booker Prize, apart from the money, the real of the International Booker Prize I always think is the reader. What the judges do and what you see at the moment when the longlist is announced is the unwrapping of a gift. They undo the ribbon, they take off the paper and there’s a gift of new books.

And these are new books that at that moment, may be very little known. Now, not every reader will like every book. That’s not how people fall in love with books, but each book will find its way to a reader who will truly appreciate what that author and translator are doing. So the prize and this is something I feel more and more, partly because it’s happened to me when I’ve made discoveries of my own, the International Booker Prize is really a prize for readers.

James Walton:

Without wishing to be too small of me, that’s been my experience. I must say when we’ve done International Booker Prize books for this podcast, it’s been a delight to be introduced to them. Just one final question for you for now, are you allowed to say whether you’ve had any favourite winners or even non-winners, or do you have to maintain a steely administrator’s neutrality?

Fiammetta Rocco:

Oh, I was looking over the list last night and there are some amazing books there. I think my two favourites of the last decade have to be Flights by the Polish writer, Olga Tokarczuk, who of course went on to win the Nobel Prize shortly afterwards, translated by Jennifer Croft, and A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman, brilliantly translated by Jessica Cohen, but here’s the thing, I can still remember one phrase of hers and I’ve never forgotten it. She’s talking about the smell of rich people as if they were wearing odour at 1%. That would not have been the exact phrase in Hebrew, but she found the perfect way of rendering it in English and it’s completely unforgettable.

Eleanor Wachtel:

Speaking of Israeli writers and their translators, I remember being told that one of Amos Oz’s memoir a Tale of Love and Darkness was actually better in English and thanks to his English translator, I think it was Nicholas Lang.

Fiammetta Rocco:

I think that quite often happens.

James Walton:

Eleanor, over to you. So the chair of judges this year, and like the original book, the International Booker Prize has five new different judges selected every year. So who are your fellow panellists for 2024?

Eleanor Wachtel:

I have Natalie Diaz, she’s a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, currently director of the Centre for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University. Romesh Gunesekera is a Sri Lankan born British novelist who himself was shortlisted for The Booker Prize.

James Walton:

That’s right with Reefer, I remember that. It’s a great book.

Eleanor Wachtel:

Yeah, William Kentridge is a groundbreaking South African visual artist, theatre and opera director and designer, and Aaron Robertson, an American writer, editor and translator from Italian with a focus on diasporic writers, or at least in recent years, I think have been a translator on the panel so that we have that angle.

James Walton:

Well, on the face of it, Eleanor, it’s quite a disparate bunch as book of judges generally are. So has it all been going so far? Have you managed to keep them in line?

Eleanor Wachtel:

No, but I don’t think that’s my job.

James Walton:

No?

Eleanor Wachtel:

My job is to listen and maybe to nudge.

James Walton:

And how many books have you all had to read?

Eleanor Wachtel:

149.

James Walton:

How hard was it to get down to 13?

Eleanor Wachtel:

Oh, it’s kind of impossible, but the hardest part actually was getting from about 20 or 25 to 13.

James Walton:

This longlist is 13, and my understanding usually is that for both Booker Prizes, the longlist isn’t too agonising because everyone can get their favourites on, it’s the short list when the blood really hits the carpet.

Eleanor Wachtel:

I don’t know about the blood part yet. I’m still at the longlist stage, but I thought it was tough. It was actually tougher than I expected.

James Walton:

And is it possible to say exactly what the judges were looking for? The Booker prides itself on rightly I think, on not insisting or even suggesting any particular criteria, so have you sort of evolved or discussed your own criteria do you think?

Eleanor Wachtel:

Well, we talked about that right at the beginning and then checking in later, but we don’t have any specific criteria. I mean we kept saying, “Well, we’ll come back later to that.” And when we came back later, there still were no specific criteria. It is quite intuitive reflecting the different judges’ sensibilities and at one point, my fellow juror William Kentridge said that what he looks for is, “To be complicit in the making of the meaning of the book.” And I guess what I hope to find and I think what we’re all looking for is books as Fiammetta was saying that we could recommend to English-speaking readers to be able to say, “Here we’ve scoured the world and brought back these gifts.”

James Walton:

And to what extent are you judging the books as translations? I mean can you possibly do that?

Eleanor Wachtel:

Well, although we celebrate books in translation, the work written in any language and given to us in English, it’s not a translation prize per se. I mean the work of the translator is typically and unfairly invisible. I mean it’s embedded in the writing and we enjoy the worlds that are open to us, but most people only really notice that it is a translation when it goes clunk and it doesn’t read well. If we knew enough, we could marvel at what the translator has achieved and at the same time, the fact that we’re highlighting these books as translations is an excellent way to draw attention to the work of so many accomplished translators.

James Walton:

Yeah, I’ve never thought of that before, but it’s one of those jobs, isn’t it? Like the goal-keeping or Wiki-keeping where if you don’t notice them, they’ve done a good job.

Eleanor Wachtel:

Or even sometimes a theatre director when everything’s smooth and going well, and then it’s the underappreciated which we’re trying to remedy.

James Walton:

Yes, exactly. No, it used to be literally thankless, but at least this way they get thanked.

Eleanor Wachtel:

That’s right.

James Walton:

So finally, before we get to the longlist itself, I’ve got quite a big question for you, Eleanor, which is have you noticed any common themes, ideas, or strands going on in the literature of the entire world?

Eleanor Wachtel:

Well, speaking on behalf of the entire world, there’s a lot of auto fiction. I mean novels that seem very much inspired by the author’s own experiences. Many books revolve around violence, especially violence against women. I mean one of the interesting aspects of this prize and the crop of books we get is that they weren’t all written this year. They were translated into English this year, but they may have been published over a range of time and yet, even so, they engage with what’s happening in the world today in so many ways.

They have the kind of immediacy, they seem to be prescient, anticipating. For instance, the current global violence or ecological disaster. I mean some seem altogether timeless, I mean about love and heartbreak, unfortunately about racism and inequality, but the thing about great writing I think is that it’s implicitly optimistic. So even if the books are dealing with violence or dark, but the power of words to make connections and inhabit other sensibilities. So that aspect of it, I didn’t want to just say the books are dealing with violence, but that aspect of it I think is in fact kind of life affirming, but to a surprising degree. I think as the third aspect of a common theme or strand is how much politics intersect with the ways in which what’s going on in the outside world impinges on the emotional life of the characters.

James Walton:

We’ve kept all listeners in suspense long enough I think as to the actual books on the 2024 longlist, unless I suppose they found them as already. So Fiammetta and Eleanor comes the hard bit for you, I’m afraid, which might rather sternly test your powers of concision. I’m going to ask you to introduce each of the books in strict alphabetical order for reasons of keeping a poker face and say a little about it and perhaps it’s easiest if you take it in turns. So, Eleanor, drum roll. I’m going to go for an actual drum roll here. Hard to imagine that’s just my fingers. Let’s have the first long-listed book for you please.

Eleanor Wachtel:

Not a River by Selva Almeida, translated by Annie McDermott. Selva Almeida is an established, influential Argentinian writer who gets compared to Flannery or O’Connor and even William Faulkner. This book is part of a loose trilogy and it’s elegant, concise, and tense. It’s about three men, two adults and the teenage son of their friend who go out fishing in a remote part of the country, haunted by their memories of a tragic accident that occurred three years earlier, and despite or because of its title, Not a River moves like water, incurrence of dream and overlaps of time, which shape the stories and memories of Enero and El Negro, the adult friends and default mentors of young Tilo whom they brought up with them on a fishing trip along the Parana River.

And the island where they set up camp is lush with jungle and heat and thick with mosquitoes and ominously, calm dark waters and pulses with its own desires and angers, tensions equal to if not exceeding those of the men who’ve come together on its shores, and this intimate peculiar moment connecting the lives of these three men also links them to the lives of the local inhabitants of this watery universe that runs by its own laws, and alongside the story of these grief-stricken men is an almost mythical manta ray. The fish, which becomes one of the guardians and ghosts of this kind of feverish novel.

James Walton:

So it’s a woman writing about men. I was interested to see that Annie Prew or possibly Annie Prew now really likes this book because she obviously is a woman who writes really well about men.

Eleanor Wachtel:

There are some women as well, but the power of the story seems to revolve around the men.

James Walton:

Okay, thank you. Over to you Fiammetta for book number two. I think we stay in Latin America, do we?

Fiammetta Rocco:

We certainly do. So the second book is Simpatía by Rodrigo Blanco Calderon, a writer who comes from Venezuela. It’s translated from Spanish by Noel Hernández González and Daniel Hahn, very well known to the International Booker Prize. Simpatía is set in contemporary Venezuela after Hugo Chávez and in the time of Nicolas Maduro when everybody who can is fleeing the country and many of these people are forced to leave their pets behind and the hero Ulysses Khan through an inheritance through somebody’s will is set the challenge of creating a rescue home for dogs. So it’s a book about family, about abandonment, orphanhood, and the strange role of empathy or charm in families and in politics in South America.

James Walton:

Thank you very much. You mentioned Daniel Hahn there, the translator. He was a judge himself, wasn’t he in 2017? So back to you, Eleanor.

Eleanor Wachtel:

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hoffman, and Jenny Erpenbeck was born in the former East Germany and that’s the context of this novel. I’ve been following and admiring her work for almost a decade and interviewed about her two earlier novels, End of Days and A Visitation. Her last one, Go and Gone was longlisted for the International Booker in 2018. With this new one, Kairos. The title refers to the Greek God of opportunity and it’s an expertly braided novel about the entanglement of personal and national transformations. It’s a perfect illustration of what I was alluding to earlier and involving the presence of politics and pinching on people’s lives. It’s said in the tumultuous time of 1980s Berlin and Kairos unfolds around a disturbing affair between Katarina, a 19-year-old student and Hans, a 53-year-old married writer in East Berlin and initially there’s this intense attraction.

They both love music and art and he of course is so knowledgeable and a kind of mentor and there’s also the drama of it’s all being kept secret. Erpenbeck’s narrative prowess lies in her ability to show how momentous personal and historical turning points intersect. So the story is set at a time when the world around them is changing dramatically. East Germany, the GDR is beginning to crumble alongside old beliefs and loyalties, and Erpenbeck masterfully refracts these generation-defining political developments through the lens of this devastating relationship, questioning the nature of destiny and agency. Its emotional and personal, somewhat autobiographical and she writes exquisite prose that marries depth and clarity. So it’s a compelling inquiry into time, choice, and the forces of history and it sounds sort of aloof or grand when I put it that way, but it just gets you in.

James Walton:

I mean East Germany, very interesting then at the very least, don’t know if this counts as a spoiler, does it get as far as the fall of the wall?

Eleanor Wachtel:

Yes.

James Walton:

Anyway, let’s go back to you Fiammetta.

Fiammetta Rocco:

The details by the Swedish writer Ia Gemberg translated by Keira Joffesen is a really witty, lively little book, even though the narrator, a bedridden woman casts a rather suit of melancholic eye over her life and it’s a little book in the sense that it’s not very long. We had some very long books, but this is not one of them, and it’s not childhood memories that she evokes so much as a series of messy relationships with friends, with family, with lovers, ex-lovers. But most of all, it’s just the most wonderful evocation of a place contemporary Stockholm with its strange light, its strange water. Its changing seasons and it’s different areas in the 1990s, which each one so singularly different.

James Walton:

It’s not called The Details for nothing then. This is bestseller in Sweden, I believe this book?

Fiammetta Rocco:

It was, absolutely. Prize winner and a bestseller.

James Walton:

Back to you, I think was still in Europe or for your next one.

Eleanor Wachtel:

We’re still in Europe. This is White Nights by Ursula Honeck, translated by Kate Webster and these are linked short stories by a young prize winning Polish poet. In fact, Ursula Honeck is the youngest writer on our longlist, age 38. She’s published three collections of poetry and it shows. This is her first prose work is evocative and economical. It’s a haunting series of interconnected stories set in a small town in the Beskids Mountains of Poland, a place enveloped by the almost continuous daylight of the summer months through a cast of characters each facing their own existential crises, Honeck crafts a narrative mosaic that explores themes of isolation, identity, death, and the longing for connection.

The book’s strength lies in its ability to capture the intense dreamlike quality of its setting where the natural phenomenon of white nights serves as a backdrop for the character’s introspective journeys. I mean White Nights is ironically a dark lyrical study of the ways in which people seek meaning and belonging in a bleak world and their engagement with death and dealing with it, whether it’s from natural causes or suicide and things don’t always go the way you think that they will, but just as a sidebar on the publishing side, like most of these books, it’s published by an independent publisher and in this case, one that’s being nominated for the first time, MTO Press is a UK-based social enterprise publishing international literature in English translation written by women and non-binary authors, and they’re committed to donating at least 50% of its profits to various causes supported by its authors. So I just thought I would add that because so many what we used to call small presses, but now independent presses are part of this International Booker Prize.

James Walton:

No, that’s another nice thing about it I think is these people who do the good work just for the sake of it, get their moment in the sun. I think well-deserved moment in the Sun. Fiammetta.

Fiammetta Rocco:

Hwang Sok-yong is arguably South Korea’s most famous writer and was longlisted for the International Prize for an earlier book in 2019. He’s 81 now, but in 1993 when he was 50, he was imprisoned for seven years for taking an unauthorised trip to North Korea to try and promote exchanges between artists in the North and the South.

James Walton:

Yes, that’s his thing, isn’t it? I mean his career should be one country.

Fiammetta Rocco:

He’s a very politically engaged writer and Mater 2-10, which was translated by Sora Kim Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae is a huge sprawling book about a career that is heavily industrialised and created by an army of industrial workers. This is a career that we don’t often see in the West. The book blends the historical story of this nation with a single individual’s quest for justice.

James Walton:

It starts right with the Japanese occupation, doesn’t it? And goes right up to the present day. I do like a generation spanner myself.

Eleanor Wachtel:

It actually starts the present day and then goes back.

James Walton:

You’ve got the advantage of me of having read it, thanks Eleanor.

Eleanor Wachtel:

Well, it’s a very dramatic opening of this man on the top of a chimney tower where it’s almost like something out of Italo Calvino, but as part of a protest that he’s doing against the bosses and the mistreatment of the worker. So you’re just taken right there and then the backstory of hundreds of pages continues.

James Walton:

Okay, well we move from one pretty well-known writer to another pretty well-known writer. In fact, possibly even more famous, so who’s your next one there, Eleanor?

Eleanor Wachtel:

It’s A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare translated by John Hodgson and Ismail Kadare is Albania’s best-known novelist and poet. Translations of his novels have appeared in more than 40 countries. He was the inaugural winner of the International Booker Prize in 2005 when it was this Lifetime Achievement Award as Fiammetta was saying, before that changed in 2016 and at 88, you’re going to think I’m obsessed with age, but he’s the oldest writer on our list.

James Walton:

We like our fans. You’ve had the youngest and the oldest, you’ve luck out.

Eleanor Wachtel:

Yes, and to look at his new book, A Dictator Calls, the core of this brilliant exploration of power is an analysis of 13 versions of a three-minute telephone conversation thought to have taken place between the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin and novelist Boris Pasternak in 1934 to discuss the arrest of the dissident Soviet poet, Osip Mandelstam who had been arrested for writing a poem critical of Stalin. Each of these versions tries to understand or justify Pasternak’s troubling, ambiguous response from a slightly different point of view. So Kadare draws on the accounts of witnesses, reporters, writers such as Isaiah, Berlin and Anna Akhmetova.

And the book begins with what seems like autobiographical memories of Kadare’s time as a student in Moscow setting the tone which hovers continually between fiction and nonfiction, what is real and what is invented, and Kadare explores the tension between authoritarian politicians and creative artists, a quest for some kind of definitive truth where none is to be found. And Kadare himself worked for many years under the watchful eye of the Albanian Communist regime before seeking political asylum in France in 1990, and apparently he too once received an unexpected phone call of his own from Albania’s, Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha.

James Walton:

Yes, they were born in the same town, those two is one of my little facts on Enver Hoxha. Yes and I also like the fact that during the ’80s apparently he smuggled out some of his own books disguised as German translations, which were then picked up by a French publisher and deposited in a Parisian bank. This is top Cold War stuff, isn’t it? So yeah, so he stands the chance of being the only person ever to win two International Booker Prizes. Fiammetta, back to you,

Fiammetta Rocco:

The Ukrainian novelist, Andrey Kurkov has been longlisted before and he’s also been a judge of the International Booker Prize. He’s quite well known here for his Dispatches. First from the Maidan in Kiev almost exactly a decade ago and then more recently from different places in Western Ukraine where he escaped when the Russians invaded. Silver Bone translated from Russian by Boris Dralyuk, it’s quite a surprising book for Kurkov.

James Walton:

In what way?

Fiammetta Rocco:

He writes normally very much about the present and this is a crime mystery. It’s set in 1919 in an atmosphere of war and revolution. I mean there are common themes with the politics of today. It’s just a very different setting for him. A young man has his ear cut off for example, with a sabre, but he manages to catch it and he keeps it in a box where it can still hear for him. So the book is full of this sense of irony and of the absurd particularly, which is what underpins so much of Kurkov’s writing.

James Walton:

Is it sort of controversial that he writes in Russian?

Fiammetta Rocco:

Yes, like many Ukrainians, he is born of a family that moved to Ukraine from another part of the Soviet Union in the 1960s. He grew up there. He’s written in Russian, but he feels very strongly about the invasion and about the situation in which Ukraine finds itself now and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we didn’t see him writing in Russian anymore.

James Walton:

He said something along those lines. It’s also been banned in Russia since 2014.

Eleanor Wachtel:

His family moved to Ukraine when he was two and since the Russian invasion, he stopped writing fiction and wrote reportage as Fiammetta was saying, and these dispatches, and he wrote the in Ukrainian only until now, he’s written his fiction in Russian and this book was published in Ukraine before the invasion.

James Walton:

And your next book, Eleanor. What’s that?

Eleanor Wachtel:

What I’d Rather Not Think About.

James Walton:

That’s the title, right?

Eleanor Wachtel:

Oh, the title? Yes, that is. What I’d Rather Not Think about by a Dutch novelist, Jente Posthuma translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey. This is Jente Posthuma’s second novel. It’s a deeply moving exploration of grief through the lives of twins, one of whom dies by suicide and Posthuma delves into the surviving twins efforts to understand and come to terms with the loss of her brother examining the profound complexities of familial bonds. In brief, precise vignettes, the sister who narrates the story looks back on their childhood and describes their adult lives, how her brother tried to find happiness but lost himself in various men in the Baguan movement and various other things that happened to him.

I mean she loves her twin and not surprisingly is angry with him for abandoning her by committing suicide, and Posthuma navigates these delicate themes with sensitivity and formal inventiveness portraying the nuances of the twins relationship and the individual struggles that they face and at the same time, she skillfully inflicts tragedy with unexpected humour and provides a multifaceted look at the search for meaning in the aftermath of suicide. Posthuma’s novel stands out for its empathetic portrayal of love, loss and resilience, and as one of my fellow jurors put it, I mean the book is viscerally true about how grief works, and at the same time, she makes you think that there’s more hope than there is.

James Walton:

Okay, no, thanks very much. Back to you, Fiammetta, you had a Swedish bestseller and now you’ve got another big Italian bestseller for the next, I believe and what’s that?

Fiammetta Rocco:

Lost on Me, which was translated by Leah Janeczko is one of two Italian books on this longlist. The author Veronica Raimo is 45 and this is her fourth novel. It’s about a completely dysfunctional Roman family. There’s obviously a lot of autofiction here. I have to say, it sounds like all my relatives. One critic said, “Lost on Me combined the slipperiness of Fleabag with a bit of Deborah Levy’s living autobiographies. It’s dark, it’s sharp, it’s good for a laugh. Just be glad it’s not your family.”

James Walton:

Okay, I think it sort of explores whether it is autobiography as well, doesn’t it?

Fiammetta Rocco:

It does and there’s quite a good line on apartment living.

Eleanor Wachtel:

Because your father keeps changing where the walls are.

James Walton:

The Italian title is Nothing True, and also this book got already got English-speaking fans. Hilarious says Roddy Doyle and thrillingly original says Monica Ali. So Eleanor? Oh, we’re still in Italy, aren’t we?

Eleanor Wachtel:

We’re still in Italy, we’re practically in the same household, but not quite. It’s a different time and a different place, but there’s some things in common. This is The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone translated by Una Stransky, and it’s a very interesting book. When it was first published in Italy, it won the country’s top literary award, the 2001 Strega Prize.

James Walton:

This is quite an old book then in fact.

Eleanor Wachtel:

It was written and published in Italian 23 years ago. Starnone is an accomplished novelist. He was born in Naples and lives in Rome. He’s written 13 works of fiction and that’s not counting the fact that he’s rumoured to be half of Elena Ferrante, the Gnome de Plume of the famous author of My Brilliant Friend and the Neapolitan Quartet. There was a very persuasive piece in The Atlantic by Rachel Donadio a few years back that traces his work and that connection, but it’s still at the rumour state.

James Walton:

And it’s co with his wife, is that?

Eleanor Wachtel:

Yes, Anita Raja, yeah. This novel, the House on Via Gemito clearly has some autobiographical aspects. I mean even the cover is of a painting by Starnone’s real father. It’s very similar to the one described in the book, painted by the narrator’s father. Anyway, it’s a marvellous novel of Naples and its environs during and after the Second World War. The prism for this tale is the relationship between the narrator and his railway worker artist father, an impossible man imbued with cowardice and boastfulness convinced that he has great artistic promise. If it weren’t for the family that he has to feed and support and the jealousy of the fellow Neapolitan artist, nothing would stop him. He’d be this world-famous artist. He’s mostly a bully, but he’s also a man who’s full of life and words and his son’s attempt to understand and forgive is compelling. We’re held in the minutiae of each argument and explosion, each hope and almost success.

James Walton:

The narrator doesn’t grow up to become an anonymous writer, that would be a real giveaway.

Eleanor Wachtel:

That would be.

James Walton:

Okay, thanks very much. Back to you, Fiammetta.

Fiammetta Rocco:

Crooked Plough by the Brazilian writer Itamar Vieira Junior, translated by Johnny Lorenz is the story of subsistence farmers in the poorest region of Brazil, Bahia where a third of enslaved Africans were sent at the height of the slave trade. They all went to this one region. Now, three generations after the abolition of slavery, this is a book as one of our judges said, which is part of a whole new generation of Brazilian writing. Very important book. It’s a book about communities, about their lands, their waters, and how despite brutal colonial disruptions, they demand love and goods and song and dreams.

James Walton:

Oh, lovely. Well, thank you and I think by a sort of seasonally circular quirk, we began with two Latin American novels. We’re about to end with two Latin American novels, aren’t we? What’s the final one on the list then?

Eleanor Wachtel:

Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener, translated by Julia Sanchez. This two is autobiographical, blending, personal, historical, and fictional modes. I mean in a way it kind of summarises all the things I was describing earlier in one not that big book, but it has a lot of things going on in it. The narrator, like Gabriela Wiener is a Peruvian writer and journalist based in Madrid who’s exploring connections to her great-great-grandfather. Charles Wiener, who was a real person, an Austrian, French, Jewish, then Catholic colonial explorer who spent two years in Peru where he managed to steal 4,000 pre-Columbian artefacts for French museums. When Gabriela’s father dies and she returns to Peru, she also looks into his infidelity, her father, not the great great one, and her own relationship to her polyandry involvements. I said there was a lot going on.

James Walton:

Yup.

Eleanor Wachtel:

It’s an engaging search for identity that explores colonialism’s surprising effects on a writer with ties. I mean she has ties to both the colonised and the coloniser investigating her ancestors starting a display case of Peruvian artefacts in Paris and ending inconclusively in a story of family love and desire.

James Walton:

And that Inconclusively concludes our 2024 International Booker Prize longlist. Thanks very much to both of you. Your powers of contusion were extraordinary. Eleanor, what happens now as far as the judges are concerned, when you whittle it down to the final sixth?

Eleanor Wachtel:

Well, we announced the short list on April 9th, and the winner will be announced on May 21st at the Tate Moderns Turbine Hall.

James Walton:

Oh, you have have a big glittering dinner. Joe and I’ll be there representing the podcast and our role will be to run around sticking microphones in people’s faces, especially ruining their evenings.

Eleanor Wachtel:

I look forward to that.

James Walton:

You two are definitely going to get the old microphone in the face of treatment I fear. In the meantime, The Booker Prizes website is launching a reading challenge. So if you’re fancy tackling the longlist, please go to bookerprizes.com/reading-challenge to find out more. Joe will be back for our next podcast when we’ll be returning to our occasional strand, the Booker versus the Bookies, and possibly taking on the biggest shock of all 1984 when Anita Bruckner’s Hotel Du Lac won against hot favourite J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, which is better, we’ll sort of decide and after that, the pair of us will get down to some serious International Booker reading to bring you an epic it says here, two episode, deep dive into the 2024 short list, but for now, let me warmly thank once again our guests, Fiammetta Rocco, and Eleanor Wachtel. Thanks so much, it’s been really lovely having you.

Eleanor Wachtel:

It’s a pleasure. So glad to be here.

Fiammetta Rocco:

Been great James, thank you.

James Walton:

And so that’s it for this episode. For a wealth of information about the longlisted books we’ve been discussing, even if you do chicken out of the reading challenge, visit The Booker Prizes website or follow the prizes on X, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook where you can also join The Booker Prize Book Group. Funny, please do follow, rate, and review this podcast. Unlike most podcasts, we haven’t been boringly assiduous about saying this every time, but it really does help. So please do follow, rate, and review, and until next time, and the Return of Joe, Goodbye.

The Booker Prize podcast is hosted by Jo Hamya and me, James Walton. It’s producer and edited by Kevin Meolo and the executive producer is John Davenport. It’s a Daddy’s SuperYacht production for the Booker Prizes.