And the IBP 2024 Winner Is…

One of the many downsides to living in Australia is that when big things happen in Europe, I’m invariably snoring away.  That was the case again last night when the judges for this year’s International Booker Prize finally revealed, after months of deliberation, who their winner was.  Of course, our Shadow Winner had been announced just a few hours earlier, so myself and the other Shadow Judges were keen to see whether our official counterparts had followed in our footsteps or gone in a different direction.

At any rate, what’s done is done – shall we?

THE WINNER OF THE 2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE IS:

Jenny Erpenbecks’s Kairos
(translated by Michael Hofmann, published by Granta Books)

Well done to all involved on their achievement 🙂

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While our panel went for Selva Almada’s Not a River (translated by Annie McDermott: Charco Press) as our winner, Kairos was actually my personal pick, so I was delighted to hear the news when I finally made it out of bed this morning.  Not everyone agrees, but I loved the way Erpenbeck threaded together a toxic relationship and the gas-lighting entity that was the German Democratic Republic, in the process crafting a compelling story that fully deserved to take out the prize.  For me, Kairos is Erpenbeck’s best book so far, and it’s the sort of work that enhances any prize that chooses it as its winner.

Although this is Erpenbeck’s first IBP win, in addition to a longlisting in 2018 for Go, Went, Gone, translated by Susan Bernofsky, in 2015 the German writer took out the final iteration of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the true spiritual predecessor of the current IBP (whatever the Booker revisionists might tell you…).  That was for The End of Days, again in Bernofsky’s translation, and with the prizes racking up, and a significant body of work in translation, I wonder if Erpenbeck has been in the thoughts of a certain group of literary minds in Sweden.  She’s not a name I’ve heard bandied around much when October rolls around, but I suspect that she must at least be in the running for consideration, if not now, then in a few years’ time.

In terms of the translation, congratulations must go to Hofmann, who (I believe) only got this gig because Bernofsky is busy with a new translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.  Interestingly, as anyone who did the IBP quiz on the Booker website a few weeks ago will know, this actually makes him the first male translator to win the prize since the revamp in 2016!

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Having looked at the winner, it’s time to reflect on the rest of the prize, and if I’m honest, I’m a little less satisfied in this regard.  I made my/our feelings clear when the longlist was announced, and having read the whole list, and reread several of them, too, I have to say that my feelings have only been confirmed.  In a year with a host of impressive eligible works, the judges came up with what was a fairly mediocre longlist, and then managed to double down on that decision by cutting a couple of the better books at the shortlist stage.  One of those was Urszula Honek’s White Nights (tr. Kate Webster: MTO Press), the only true pleasant surprise of this year’s selection, a book we eventually awarded third place (and an honourable mention).

If you believe that all’s well that ends well, then perhaps Erpenbeck’s victory means this year’s proceedings were a success, but if you’re inclined to think that it’s more about the destination than the journey, you’re probably a little disappointed by the whole affair.  There have certainly been years with worse books, but on the whole, the longlist was fairly bland, and dull.  The judges obviously had a penchant for autofiction, a genre that can get very old very quickly, and there seemed to be a preference for quick, light reads, too.  In such a field, Erpenbeck’s novel stood out like a sore thumb, and we can only wonder what might have been if writers like Marie NDiaye, Carlos Fonseca, Jón Kalman Stefánsson and Yu Miri had graced the longlist.  It would certainly have made for a more entertaining bout of reading at any rate…

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Of course, when I start airing my views like this, there’s the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man (and I freely admit that there’s certainly an element of that in my ramblings), but I was by no means the only member of the Shadow Panel who was disappointed with the crop of 2024.  Our annual festival of reading and second-guessing the official judges is meant to be a labour of love, but this year it seemed as if there was a lot of labouring and not a whole lot of loving, if you catch my drift.  It was great, as always, to get together for a Zoom discussion, but outside that, there were times when our discussion threads ground to a halt, with many of us reading other things before forcing ourselves to return to the task at hand.

So, what does that mean for the future?  Well, a year is a long time, and who knows where we’ll be, or what we’ll be doing, in March 2025.  However, one thing I can say with some certainty now is that this will be the last time I (and possibly some of the other judges, too) will be shadowing the prize in our current format.  When you can’t really be sure that you’re going to be rewarded with a collection of enjoyable reads, committing to thirteen books chosen by random strangers is a bit of a risk.  Which is not to say that I’m throwing in the towel completely; instead, I suspect that I may look at shadowing the prize in a different way, perhaps by departing from the official judges at the longlist stage…

That’s just a thought at the moment, and there’s a long way to go before the IBP cycle rolls round again, but for now it’s time to leave that all behind and focus on other books (it’s not as if I’m short of stuff to read).  Many thanks to everyone who has joined us on this vicarious trip around the literary world – I hope you’ve enjoyed it.  And, if you did, look out for more bookish voyages in the future.  You see, round these parts, we rarely go long without a literary overseas trip, and you’re always welcome to come along 🙂