LONDON, April 23. /TASS/. Russian writer Maria Stepanova has been shortlisted for the 2021 Booker International Prize awarded annually for "the finest fiction from around the world" that has been translated into English, organizers of the prestigious award told a TASS correspondent on Thursday.
The Russian author was included in the list of six authors representing five countries thanks to her essay-like memoir In Memory of Memory, a study of personal and historic memory in which the writer narrates the story of her family. In 2018, this piece won Russia's Bolshaya Kniga award.
In the present format of the prize which has been in effect since 2016, she is the first Russian author who had been first included in the longlist of 13 names and then - in the shortlist. Previously, this division had not existed. In 2009, Liudmila Ulitskaya was among the nominees, and in 2013 - Vladimir Sorokin.
Why was the book chosen
British author Lucy Hughes-Hallett, chair of the judges, explaining why Stepanova’s book was selected, called her work a moving piece, full of grief and vitality which fuses together "history, memory, essay, meditation."
"It is long book, it is the last book that we have read. It's so original. It seems like one of those books where the writer is writing about the writing of the book. And it is that but it is not just about the writing of the book, it's also about the journey into memory, the journey into Stepanova's family history which is interestingly not full of drama. Her family has lived through the First World War, the subsequent Russian civil war, through Stalin purges, Holocaust and somehow they kept out of this big public events," the judge said in response to a question by a TASS correspondent.
"She's writing about small private lives and making them seem extraordinarily charged with emotional significance and excitement. And at the same time, she's thinking about memory and the whether we can or not ever recover the past, whether we can know the dead. And that becomes increasingly powerful. It's a very, very moving book, full of grief, kind of mourning but also a tremendous gratitude for life," the chair of the judges noted.
Who else was shortlisted
Together with Stepanova’s memoir, there are two pieces translated from Spanish, two - from French, and one book originally written in Danish in the running. Out of 125 books considered, the short list includes At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop from France, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez from Argentina, When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut from Spain, The Employees by Olga Ravn from Denmark, and The War of the Poor by Eric Vuillard from France.
About the prize
As opposed to the Booker Prize, founded in 1969 and awarded annually to the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK or Ireland, the International Booker Prize was established in 2004 and until 2016 had been awarded once every two years. Now it is awarded annually.
An author of any book, translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland may become a winner. The award amounts to 50,000 pounds ($69,000) to be split equally between author and translator. In Memory of Memory was translated into English by British poet, writer and translator Sasha Dugdale.
The winner will be announced on June 2. Last year, the award went to Dutch novelist Marieke Lucas Rijneveld for the novel The Discomfort of Evening.