Nino Kharatishvili's 'Eighth Life' in contention for International Booker Prize
German-based Kharatishvili has been honoured with critical acclaim and prizes for her work in literature. Photo: Tobias Bohm.
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Award-winning author Nino Kharatishvili's epic bestseller The Eighth Life is a contender for this year's International Booker Prize, after the generational saga was revealed in the award's longlist on Thursday.
Selected alongside 12 novels by the likes of Michel Houellebecq, Samanta Schweblin and Yoko Ogawa, the Bertolt Brecht Prize-winning book is celebrated in the list as one of the "finest translated fiction from around the world".
Awarded for works translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland, granting a money prize of £50,000 to a winning pair of an author and their translator.
The longlist of 13 novels has been drawn by juries from 124 books, with the team comprised of Ted Hodgkinson, Head of Literature and Spoken Word at Southbank Centre, Lucie Campos, director of the Villa Gillet, France's centre for international writing, translator and writer Jennifer Croft, author Valeria Luiselli and writer Jeet Thayil.
We are pleased to announce the #InternationalBooker2020 longlist. Watch what our judges had to say. Read more: https://t.co/DqFrDwH2Bp#FinestFiction #TranslatedFiction pic.twitter.com/lXbiSSbllF
— The Booker Prizes (@TheBookerPrizes) February 27, 2020
Whether reimagining foundational myths, envisioning dystopias of disquieting potency, or simply setting the world ablaze with the precision of their perceptions, these are books that left indelible impressions on us as judges," Hodgkinson, who heads the jury team, said.
The selection will be used to draw a shortlist in April, with eventual winner revealed at a later date.
The Eighth Life (for Brilka) was translated into English from German and published by Scribe Publications last year, with the author herself introduced to readers in three London events in November.
The 900-page-plus novel explores a range of personalities from across decades of the 20th century, whose lives in the Caucasus are dominated by political authoritarianism and family tragedy.
The book's scope goes all the way through the turbulent years of Georgia's violent breaking away from the Soviet Union and personal experiences of its protagonists in the violent period.
A Guardian review called it a "landmark epic", with the novel translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin from the original German, where it also earned Kharatishvili the prestigious Anna Seghers Prize.