A little under five weeks ago, the Man Booker International Prize shadow panel announced our shadow shortlist. We’ve since gone back to the books, talked it over, cast our votes, and now we can reveal our shadow winner for 2019. It is:
The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean (MacLehose Press)
We’d also like to award honourable mentions to Annie Ernaux’s The Years (tr. Alison L. Strayer) and Sara Stridsberg’s The Faculty of Dreams (tr. Deborah Bragan-Turner), both of which gave us much to discuss.
The official Man Booker International winner will be announced tonight. Last year, both panels chose the same book, Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (tr. Jennifer Croft). I wonder if the same thing will happen again this time: we’ll find out later.
Read my other posts on the 2019 Man Booker International Prize here.
21st May 2019 at 12:24 pm
I’ve just borrowed this one from the library and have really been looking forward to it.
21st May 2019 at 6:26 pm
I hope you enjoy it (and congratulations on having such a well-stocked library…)!
21st May 2019 at 6:25 pm
Look forward to seeing if you have predicted right! I’ve heard great things about this and The Years
21st May 2019 at 6:37 pm
I’d be interested to know what you make of them! I should say that our winner isn’t meant to be a prediction of the official winner. But I’m always curious to see how our decisions compare. I suspect this year they’ll choose something different, but I wouldn’t like to guess what.
21st May 2019 at 7:00 pm
It’s always hard to know how these prizes will go – I’m often more keen on the Shadow panel winners than the real ones!