A Look at the 2020 International Booker Prize

A reviews series – one book at a time

It has been an unusual year for the International Booker Prize. The shortlist was announced according to plan on the 2nd of April 2020, with the original intention of naming the Prize winner on the 19th May. However, following conversations with publishers about disrupted public access to the shortlisted books during the COVID-19 lockdown, the Prize date was pushed back to the 26th of August.

This turned out to be very good fortune for me. I’m an English and Creative Writing student going into my 3rd year, and I’ve never followed the International Booker Prize before. If the prize had gone ahead in May, I would have missed it once again and been none the wiser. Fortunately, I came across the delayed shortlist in June, quite by accident, and at exactly the right time.

I’ve felt at times that this lockdown has presented me with a singular choice, read, or slowly lose my mind in the pit of depressively spiralling self-reflection, forced upon us all by these months of isolation. Having only just pieced my mind back together after a terrible year of personal collapses and failure, the choice was very clear. I chose books and sanity, and in recent months I found my interests expanding far beyond my long-established literary comfort zone; I’m a fantasy fiction glutton by nature. But, as we approach the new academic year my emerging passion is the hunt for new voices, and the chance to keep learning and breaking my misconceptions about the wider world, and about myself. As Fiametta Rocco, The Administrator for the International Booker Prize, stated in April, “Literature is the one art form that puts us completely in somebody else’s shoes. It is the supreme act of empathy, as crucial to the survival of the human spirit as water or air.” Not only is this a moving statement, it is an apt herald to the importance of reading in our current circumstances.

Last month I read, to name a few, The Shadow of The Sun by Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuściński, Freedom by American novelist Jonathan Franzen, The Sellout by American satirist Paul Beatty, and the beautiful short stories Gigi and The Cat by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (the acclaimed French author, and the first woman to be given a state funeral in France). I’m very grateful to the friends who recommended these books. The translations, in particular, have awakened a voracious hunger to continue finding and listening to the unique and varied voices of international authors. It was at the very moment in which I acknowledged this desire, that I came across news of the delayed 2020 International Booker Prize shortlist on Instagram; what luck!

So, for July and August, I am starting here, with the 2020 International Booker Prize shortlist. The first book on my stack is The Enlightenment of The Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar. I will be reading and reviewing a book a week for the next six weeks, and I am excited to begin this journey. I hope that some of the readers here may decide to join me on my way.

---

by Jasper Evans