Man Booker International prize 2019 longlist sees small publishers win big

Judges praise the 13 finalists – all but two published by indie houses – for ‘enriching our idea of what fiction can do’

The “finest works of translation from around the world” are almost exclusively published by independent presses – at least according to the Man Booker International prize, which has unveiled a longlist of 13 books with only two showings from major publishing houses.

The prize is worth £50,000 to its winners, split equally between author and translator. This year’s longlist ranges from Chinese author Can Xue’s Love in the New Millennium, set in a world of constant surveillance and translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, to Palestinian-Icelandic writer Mazen Maarouf’s Jokes for the Gunmen, a collection of stories set in a war zone told from the perspective of a child, translated from Arabic by Jonathan Wright.

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