Man Booker International 2013 shortlist revealed
25th January 2013 - 2:3pm
The shortlist of ten authors up for the fifth Man Booker International Prize has been announced.
Finalists from nine different countries make up the list, including, for the first time, a Swiss writer.
The biennial GBP 60,000 award is different to the Man Booker prize in that it recognises one writer for his or her overall achievement in fiction, rather than for a single work.
The nominees are U. R. Ananthamurthy (India), Aharon Appelfeld (Israel), Lydia Davis (USA), Intizar Husain (Pakistan), Yan Lianke (China), Marie NDiaye (France), Josip Novakovich (Canada), Marilynne Robinson (USA), Vladimir Sorokin (Russia) and Peter Stamm (Switzerland).
Robinson, shortlisted for the 2011 award, is the only author to have been a previous finalist and is one of just three authors writing in English selected for the prize.
At 45, NDiaye becomes the youngest author ever to be a Man Booker International nominee.
A judging panel chaired by literary critic Sir Christopher Ricks and consisting of author Elif Batuman, writer Aminatta Forna, novelist Yiyun Li and author and academic Tim Parks will pore over the works before the overall winner will be announced in London on May 22nd.
Ricks said: 'Each is the author of a substantial body of published work, whether novels or short stories, either written in or translated into English.
'Some of these men and women are in their eighties, the youngest in their forties and fifties. They write in ways that are astonishingly different.'
Previous winners of the Man Booker International Prize include Philip Roth (2011), Alice Munro (2009) and Chinua Achebe (2007).