Nana Ekvtimishvili in International Booker Prize longlist for debut novel

Author and film director Nana Ekvtimishvili is in the longlist for this year's International Booker Prize, presented as "the leading literary award in the English speaking world", for her debut novel The Pear Field.

The English-language edition of the work, unveiled to readers in November, will be in contention for the prize with a dozen other books representing authors and languages from around the world and published in English.

Revealed on Tuesday, the longlist will be further narrowed down on April 22 when the juries present their shortlist for the prize, before the eventual winner is presented in early June.

Beside wide recognition brought by the prize, the winning work will earn its author and translator a £50,000 money prize. Ekvtimishvili's work was translated from its original Georgian release by Elizabeth Heighway and published by Peirene Press.

[T]he prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK and Ireland

- International Booker Prize organisers

In the novel, the protagonist Lela is one of the children neglected at a school for intellectually disabled on the outskirts of Georgia's capital Tbilisi. As she turns 18 and can legally leave the institution, Lela begins to plan for a future outside the place she has known all life.

• See the full longlist of the 2021 International Booker Prize

The novel was called "an unflinching picture of post-Soviet Georgian life, as experienced by those on the margins of society" by organisers of its UK launch, with the author "interspersing vivid snapshots from Lela’s past with the turbulent present".

Its 2015 Georgian edition swept three of the major national literary prizes - the Saba Award, the Litera Prize and the Iliauni Literary Award. The English edition was selected for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's 2021 Literature Prize longlist earlier this month.