The judges for the biennial 2013 Man Booker International Prize were announced in London, 2 December, 2011. This is the fifth time that the Prize has been awarded. In order to ensure a panel with the broadest reading experience, the number of judges will increase from three to five. Chaired by Sir Christopher Ricks, the scholar and literary critic, the panel consists of author and essayist Elif Batuman, writer and broadcaster Aminatta Forna, novelist Yiyun Li and author and academic Tim Parks.
Fiammetta Rocco, Administrator of the Prize, comments:
“With a deep personal knowledge of contemporary fiction from Britain, the United States, Europe, Russia, Africa and Asia, this is an enormously experienced panel of judges. They bring scholarship, wit and a passion for reading to the task in hand.”
The Man Booker International Prize, worth £60,000, is awarded for an achievement in fiction on the world stage. It is presented every two years to a living author for a body of work published either originally in English or widely available in translation in the English language.
The winner is chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel; there are no submissions from publishers. It has previously been awarded to Ismail Kadaré in 2005, Chinua Achebe in 2007, Alice Munro in 2009 and Philip Roth in 2011.
The Man Booker International Prize has rapidly established itself as a leading accolade in world literature: it was recently described by the Observer as “an ever more competent alternative to the Nobel.”
The judges’ list of finalists, eight writers under serious consideration for the prize, will be announced in spring 2013. The winner of the next Man Booker International Prize will be announced in early summer 2013. The Prize will be presented at an awards ceremony in July 2013.
The Prize is sponsored by Man, which also sponsors the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. The Man Booker International Prize is significantly different from the annual Man Booker Prize in that it highlights one writer’s continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. Both prizes strive to recognise and reward the finest modern literature.
The Judges
Sir Christopher Ricks (Chair)
Sir Christopher Ricks is Warren Professor of the Humanities and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, having formerly been professor of English at the University of Bristol and at Cambridge. He was the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, 2004-09. A member of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, he was its president, 2007-08. Whereas most of his work as a critic and editor has been devoted to poetry (Milton, Tennyson, Keats, T.S. Eliot, Bob Dylan, The Oxford Book of English Verse and most recently The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse), Sir Christopher has also turned his attention to fiction in his book, Beckett’s Dying Words; in editing Samuel Beckett’s The Expelled / The Calmative / The End / First Love and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew; and in a collection of his essays on the novel from Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Henry James, through to Ernest Hemingway, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Christina Stead, Brian Moore, Kingsley Amis, V.S. Naipaul and Ian McEwan. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, Sir Christopher has reviewed fiction from France, Germany, Italy, Israel, Canada and South Africa.
Elif Batuman
Aminatta Forna
Aminatta Forna is a writer. She was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and spent periods of her childhood in Zambia, Iran and Thailand. She holds dual British and Sierra Leonian nationality. Her most recent novel, The Memory of Love, was winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award 2011 and shortlisted for the Orange Prize and Warwick Prize. The Devil that Danced on the Water, a memoir of her dissident father and Sierra Leone was shortlisted for the 2003 Samuel Johnson Prize and her first novel, Ancestor Stones, was winner of the 2007 German Liberaturpreis, the Hurston Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction 2007 and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize 2010 in the US. A short story, ‘Hayward’s Heath’ was short-listed for the BBC National Short Story Award 2010.
Between 1989 and 1999 Ms Forna worked for BBC Television as a reporter and film maker in the spheres of art and politics, including on The Late Show. She has filmed a number of documentaries in Africa: Through African Eyes, the series Africa Unmasked and most recently The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu. She is a regular guest and occasional host of BBC Radio’s Open Book and Saturday Review and other BBC radio arts programmes.
Ms Forna sits on the Advisory Board of the Caine Prize for African Writing and the Royal Literary Fund. She is currently Sterling Brown Visiting Professor of African Literature at Williams College, Massachusetts.
Yiyun Li
Tim Parks
Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks studied at Cambridge and Harvard before moving permanently to Italy in 1981. Author of three bestselling books on Italy, and fourteen novels, including the Booker short-listed Europa, he has translated works by Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, Roberto Calasso and, most recently, Niccolò Machiavelli. In addition to running a post-graduate degree course in translation at IULM University, Milan, he writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. His non-fiction works include Translating Style, a literary approach to translation problems, Medici Money, an account of the relation between banking, the Church and art in the 15th century, and, most recently, Teach Us to Sit Still, which was described by David Lodge as: “A searingly honest, viscerally vivid, darkly comic self-examination of the connections between writing, personality and health”.