Six books, set in locations including Istanbul and the Austrian Alps, during periods as mixed as the great famine in China and the Angolan civil war, telling stories of a female friendship in Camorra-controlled Naples and of a Korean wife’s transformative rebellion, have been announced as the finalists for the 2016 Man Booker International prize.

The Nobel prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, Chinese dissident Yan Lianke, Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa, Austrian Robert Seethaler and South Korean Han Kang have all been shortlisted for the award, which celebrates the finest global fiction translated into English. The winner will receive £50,000, to be split evenly between author and translator.

The six-book selection was whittled from a longlist of 13, and an original pool of 155 entries. With six different languages represented, and four countries – Angola, Austria, South Korea and Turkey – appearing for the first time, judges praised the diversity of an “exhilarating” shortlist.

Agualusa and Pamuk have both previously won the Independent foreign fiction prize, which ran until 2015, when it merged with the Man Booker International prize. The merge came with a number of changes: the Man Booker International now runs as an annual award, and recognises a single book. Previously the prize was awarded every second year to an author for their entire body of work, a tradition that Jonathan Taylor, president of the Man Booker Foundation, said had caused it to lose momentum.

Agualusa is chosen for his novel A General Theory of Oblivion, the story of a woman who bricks herself inside her apartment on the eve of Angolan independence and spends the next 28 years living off vegetables and pigeons until a child outside begins interacting with her. The judges called Agualusa’s book “a unique portrait of a society in flux”.



The judges also named The Story of a Lost Child, the fourth and final novel in Elena Ferrante’s Naples-set series, calling it “a veritable feast”. Despite making international bestseller lists, Ferrante has never been identified in public; her English translator, New Yorker staffer Ann Goldstein, only interacts with Ferrante via emails through her publisher.

Yan, who was a Man Booker International prize finalist in 2013, is nominated for The Four Books, a braiding of four narratives set in a labour camp before and during the great famine in the late 1950s. The novel took Yan 20 years to plan and two to write, before it was rejected by 20 publishers for its political content and banned in mainland China. The judges called Yan “one of China’s boldest living writers”.

Han Kang is shortlisted for The Vegetarian, her first novel to be translated into English. The tale of a young woman whose decision to stop eating meat sets loose dark dreams and violence within her family, it was described by the judges as an “evocative and suggestive” book that “startles, for the depths of its strangeness”.

Pamuk joins the finalists with A Strangeness in My Mind, a love story set in Istanbul, seen through the eyes of a street vendor over four decades. In his review for the Guardian, Alberto Manguel called the book “a vast collection of characters, events, houses, food, objects that, the reader realises at the end of 600 pages, are summed up in the name Istanbul”.

Seethaler’s A Whole Life, meanwhile, tells the story of Andreas, a man who spends his years in the Austrian Alps, leaving only to fight in the second world war, before returning to find that the outside world has reached his remote valley home. The judges called Seethaler’s novel “superbly crafted … a literary gem”.

Chaired by writer and critic Boyd Tonkin, the 2016 judging panel consists of novelist and anthropologist Tahmima Anam; Professor David Bellos, director of Princeton University’s translation programme; Professor Daniel Medin, who teaches comparative literature at the American University of Paris; and poet and author Ruth Padel. Tonkin said the shortlist “will take readers both around the globe and to every frontier of fiction”.

“Our selection shows that the finest books in translation extend the boundaries not just of our world, but of the art of fiction itself,” he said. “We hope that readers everywhere will share our pleasure and excitement in this shortlist.”

Anam said choosing the shortlist had sparked passionate debates between the judges. “In the process we each had to lose books that we felt strongly about, but in the end I really do believe we’ve come up with a shortlist that we can all be proud of,” she said.

Each author and translator on the shortlist will receive £1,000. The winner will be announced on 16 May.

The 2016 Man Booker International prize shortlist:

A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn.

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith.

The Four Books by Yan Lianke, translated by Carlos Rojas.

A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Ekin Oklap.

A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler, translated by Charlotte Collins.

• This article was amended on 14 April 2016. An earlier version referred to Yan Lianke as Lianke, rather than Yan, after first mention.

