Publishers of novels shortlisted for the £50,000 prize appeal to organisers as book sales take a battering under lockdown

The six authors up for this year’s International Booker prize will have to wait a little longer to find out who won. The announcement has been postponed until the summer due to the severe impact of the coronavirus outbreak on book sales.

The winner of the £50,000 award for the best novel translated into English, shared equally between author and translator, was due to be announced on 19 May. But prize organisers say that the announcement of the shortlist on 2 April exposed the difficulties that readers were having getting hold of books during the lockdown.

Only one of the shortlisted books, Japanese author Yōko Ogawa’s novel The Memory Police, has sold more than 5,000 copies. Three of the books – The Discomfort of Evening by Dutch newcomer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Iran’s Shokoofeh Azar, and The Adventures of China Iron by Argentina’s Gabriela Cabezón Cámara – have sold fewer than 1,000 copies.

Most of the publishers of the shortlisted books appealed to the Booker Prize Foundation, the charity that oversees the prize, to delay this year’s award. Daniela Petracco at Europa Editions, which published Azar’s novel, was one of them.

“We talked to Faber and some other of the shortlisted publishers and found there was agreement on approaching the Booker Foundation with the suggestion to postpone to a more propitious moment, at a time when booksellers – independents and chains – can make the most of it and readers can easily get their hands on the books,” she said. “The Booker Foundation were already considering a postponement as it turns out, so there was broad agreement there.”

Jacques Testard of Fitzcarraldo, the publisher of previous International Booker winner and Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, said the book trade “has all but shut down in recent weeks”.

He added: “A winner announcement in May, in the current context, would have been a bit bittersweet for the winners, who might not have had a chance to enjoy their success as they might another year. We’re grateful to the Booker Foundation for taking this decision.”

Gaby Wood, the foundation’s literary director, said: “After careful consideration, we’ve decided on this course of action to ensure that the shortlist, and ultimately the winner, can be celebrated at a time when readership of these exceptional novels is made easier for everyone. As the world begins to recover, their contents will be found all the more rewarding for being, in effect, a form of travel.”

The shortlisted books are: Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes; Cabezón Cámara’s The Adventures of China Iron, translated from Spanish by Iona Macintyre and Fiona Mackintosh; Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, translated from Farsi by an anonymous translator; Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening, translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchinson; Ogawa’s The Memory Police, translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder; and Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll, translated from German by Ross Benjamin.

A new date for the International Booker winner announcement will be revealed later in the year.

The announcement of the winner of the Women’s prize for fiction has also been postponed, from June to September.