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.

Man Booker International and Independent foreign fiction prizes merge to create super-award Read more

On Tuesday it was announced that the Independent foreign fiction prize will no longer operate. (Noo!) It will, however, reincarnate (aha!) as a new Man Booker International prize, effective immediately. The former Man Booker International prize will disappear (more of that in a moment), its replacement taking on a close resemblance to the departing Indy: a single-book prize, for fiction in English translation, awarded annually each spring. Indeed, almost everything that’s good about the Indy will survive into the new prize (including the inestimable Boyd Tonkin in the chair). One of the few changes, and worth noting, is that the prize money, split equally between author and translator, will go from a pretty generous £10,000 to a more Booker-scaled £50,000.

What does this mean? Well, first, as a translator and reader who is rather keen on international writing, I think it’s Good News. Sure, for reasons entirely of sentiment, I’m sorry we’re losing the Indy name (I only have any kind of career at all because I had the good fortune to win the prize myself back in 2007); but in our literary prize world the Man Booker name is hardly a shabby replacement. And the profile that the new name will bring, and the substantial prize pot, can only help to raise the profile of international writing in the UK (which, while undoubtedly improving, can still use all the help it can get). This in turn should excite readers and potential publishers alike. Like I say: Good News.

But what are we losing? Well, the glass-half-empty version is that we’re effectively losing a whole prize. The old Man Booker International rewarded a career rather than a single book and spanned writers from across the world, Anglophone and translated together, and we’ll no longer have a prize doing that. (Losing any prize that gives us an opportunity to champion a foreign-language writer is a shame, even if in practice this year’s winner, László Krasnahorkai, was only the second non-Anglophone ever to have taken it.) What saddens me particularly is that the Man Booker International was one of the few significant prizes that judged English-language originals and English-language translations together within a single category. The Guardian’s own first book award is another such, but it’s the exception, and I’d argue that it shouldn’t be.

Prizes that isolate translations from the mainstream (just as, say, prizes that isolate books only written by women) seem to me to have great value as long as they can usefully contribute to what one might call a kind of market engineering - helping to persuade publishers, critics or readers to value books of type X more than they currently do. They are potentially powerful interventions, but to my mind their aim should be a mainstreaming success for their category of books that’s so great as to make themselves redundant. For now, at least, I’d argue that we will still benefit substantially from a prize that draws attention – specifically, exclusively – to great international writing. I’m delighted that prize is going to be a Man Booker gong: a major award to celebrate the best translated-into-English novel, on a par with a major prize to celebrate the best written-in-English novel. It may be just what the literary world needs.

But eight or 10 years from now, I hope we’ll need something quite different. Ideally, by that point we’d have a mature international market in the UK, in which the Booker prize foundation would open the borders of its original prize to welcome foreign books, and also reverse today’s change: in other words, offering simply a Man Booker prize for a book, and a Man Booker prize for a career, each of them open to everyone, regardless of original language. We’re not there yet, but I hope this new prize – the attention it will bring to great translated books, and the incentives it will offer intrepid publishers and translators – helps move us in that direction.