Announcing the 2018 Man Booker International Prize Winner
The 2018 Man Booker International Prize Winner is Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft. The £50,000 prize, which celebrates the finest works of translated fiction from around the world, has been divided equally between the author and translator. (They also both received a further £1,000 for being on the shortlist.)
It was selected from more than one hundred submissions by a panel of five judges, chaired by Lisa Appignanesi, author and cultural commentator, and consisting of: Michael Hofmann, poet, reviewer and translator from German; Hari Kunzru, author of five novels including The Impressionist and White Tears; Tim Martin, journalist and literary critic, and Helen Oyeyemi, author of novels, plays and short stories including What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours.
Chair, Lisa Appignanesi comments:
“Our deliberations were hardly easy, since our shortlist was such a strong one. But I’m very pleased to say that we decided on the great Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk as our winner: Tokarczuk is a writer of wonderful wit, imagination and literary panache. In Flights, brilliantly translated by Jennifer Croft, by a series of startling juxtapositions she flies us through a galaxy of departures and arrivals, stories and digressions, all the while exploring matters close to the contemporary and human predicament–where only plastic escapes mortality.”
Past winners include:
A Horse Walks Into A Bar by David Grossman, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen
The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith
