The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld joins five other ‘expansively imagined’ novels contending for £50,000 award

This article is more than 5 months old

This article is more than 5 months old

Dutch author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has become one of the youngest writers to be shortlisted for a Booker prize, after their debut novel made the final line-up for the International Booker.

Rijneveld, a rising star in Dutch literature, is 28 – slightly older than British author Daisy Johnson was when she was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2018, age 27. The author, who identifies as male and uses the pronouns they/them, was shortlisted after a six-hour virtual judging meeting for the £50,000 prize, which is shared equally between writer and translator, for The Discomfort of Evening, translated by Michele Hutchison. The novel, tells of a girl whose brother dies in a skating accident and draws from Rijneveld’s own experiences: when they were three, their 12-year-old brother was knocked over and killed by a bus.

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“Rijneveld’s language renders the world anew, revealing the shocks and violence of early youth through the prism of a Dutch dairy farm. The strangeness of a child looking at the strangeness of the world,” said judges of the work.

The Discomfort of Evening is one of six novels in the running for the International Booker, each of which, said chair of judges Ted Hodgkinson, “restlessly reinvents received narratives, from foundational myths to family folklore, plunging us into discomfiting and elating encounters with selves in a state of transition”.

Exploring trauma, loss and illness and translated from five languages – Spanish, German, Dutch, Farsi and Japanese – the shortlist, said Hodgkinson, “transcends this unprecedented moment, immersing us in expansively imagined lives that hold enduring fascination”.

Shokoofeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, translated by a writer who is remaining anonymous for security reasons, is narrated by the ghost of a 13-year-old girl fleeing her home after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll, translated from German by Ross Benjamin, draws from medieval German folklore to tell the story of trickster Tyll Ulenspiegel. And Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, translated by Sophie Hughes from Spanish, opens with the discovery of a murder victim in a Mexican village.

The Adventures of China Iron, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s feminist retelling of Argentina’s foundational gaucho epic Martín Fierro, is translated by Iona Macintyre and Fiona Mackintosh from Spanish. And first published more than 20 years ago in 1994, Yōko Ogowa’s The Memory Police, translated by Stephen Snyder from Japanese, is a fable about an island where people and objects are made to disappear until the inhabitants forget they ever existed.

“In these distracting and isolating times, it’s difficult to see beyond the current crisis, but through these exceptional feats of translation, we encounter characters and sensibilities which have lasting resonance,” said Hodgkinson, who is head of literature and spoken word at London’s Southbank Centre.

“Some of the books on our shortlist uncannily channel the air of contagion into deft dystopias or plague-ridden historical epics, and some transport us to worlds as varied as a rural Mexican village and a Dutch dairy farm. But above all they grant us access to richly realised interior worlds, arresting enough to quieten any distraction and collapse any social distance.”

Hodgkinson chaired a panel of five judges who selected the shortlist from 124 submissions. The coronavirus pandemic meant their meeting had to be virtual, but Hodgkinson said he and his panel still managed to discuss the line-up for more than six hours.

“Of course there’s no substitute for being in the same room to discuss intricate matters of translation… but in the end it didn’t matter that we were as far apart as LA and Bangalore, there was enough rapport and mutual respect to traverse the distance and overcome any technical glitches,” he said.

Hodgkinson was joined on the panel by Lucie Campos, director of the Villa Gillet, France’s centre for international writing; International Booker-winning translatorJennifer Croft; Folio-winning author Valeria Luiselli; and the Booker-shortlisted writer, poet and musician Jeet Thayil.

The winner will be announced on 19 May.

2020 International Booker prize shortlist

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar, translated by Anonymous from Farsi (Europa Editions)

The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated by Iona Macintyre and Fiona Mackintosh from Spanish (Charco Press)

Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin from German (Quercus)

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes from Spanish (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogowa, translated by Stephen Snyder from Japanese (Harvill Secker)

The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison from Dutch (Faber & Faber)