13 titles longlisted for 2022 International Booker Prize, $84K award for fiction translated to English

The International Booker Prize has revealed the 13 works of fiction on their 2022 longlist.

The annual award celebrates the best works of fiction from around the world that have been translated into English and published in the U.K. or Ireland. The £50,000 (approx. $84,540 Cdn) grand prize is divided equally between writer and translator.

This year's longlist features books translated from 11 languages: Korean, Danish, Norwegian, Hebrew, French, Japanese, Spanish, Indonesian, Portuguese, Hindi and Polish.

Past winners, Polish writer and 2018 Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk and translator Jennifer Croft, and Israeli writer David Grossman and Hebrew translator Jessica Cohen are on the longlist for their most recent books.

Over 900 pages long, Tokarczuk and Croft's The Books of Jacob is an epic novel set in the mid-18th century, about a young Jewish man with a mysterious past who settles down in a Polish village. It's not long before this charismatic man has attracted a cult of loyal disciples, who follow his every erratic move through the decade — crossing borders, changing religions and sowing chaos wherever they go.

The judges praised the book for weaving "an epic tapestry from the bizarre, mundane and utterly unpredictable sweep of history."

Tokarczuk and Croft previously won the prize in 2018 for Flights and were shortlisted in 2019 for Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Tokarczuk lives in Wroclaw, Poland, while Croft resides in Los Angeles.

LISTEN | Jennifer Croft on Writers & Company:

Writers and Company56:15Translator and writer Jennifer Croft on her extraordinary childhood and the places it's led her

The award-winning translator tells her own remarkable story in her memoir, Homesick — a poignant exploration of language, sisterhood and her struggle with depression.

Grossman and Cohen are nominated for More Than I Love My Life, a novel set on a kibbutz in Israel in 2008, as a family celebrates the 90th birthday of their matriarch, Vera. The party is disrupted by the return of Vera's long-absent daughter Nina, who abandoned her daughter Gili as an infant. The three women are forced to confront Vera's past as a political prisoner, and the decision she made that changed all of their lives.

• 15 must-read Canadian translations

"More Than I Love My Life is a tender and immersive multigenerational family novel," the judges said in a press release.

Grossman and Cohen won the International Booker Prize in 2017 for their previous work A Horse Walks into a Bar. Grossman is an Israeli author whose work has been translated into more than 30 languages. Cohen is a Hebrew translator who was born in England, raised in Israel and now lives in Denver.

Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell's novel Tomb of Sand is the first book to be translated from Hindi to appear on the International Booker Prize longlist. The novel follows an 80-year-old woman in northern India, struggling in the aftermath of her husband's death. When she rises again, Ma decides to live a life free of social conventions, surprising her modern, bohemian daughter. Against her family's wishes, Ma travels to Pakistan to finally face the trauma she's been suppressing since her teenage years during Partition.

The judges described Tomb of Sand as, "a loud and irresistible novel."

Shree is an accomplished short story writer and novelist from New Delhi, India. Tomb of Sand is her first book to be published in the U.K. Daisy Rockwell resides in Vermont, U.S. and translates Hindi and Urdu literature.

• L.M. Montgomery's classic Anne of Green Gables named most translated Canadian book

Translator Anton Hur is on the longlist twice: with Korean writer Bora Chung and her "richly imaginative" collection Cursed Bunny, and with Korean writer Sang Young Park and his "energetic" novel Love in the Big City.

The stories in Cursed Bunny draw from horror, science fiction and magical realism to expose the tyranny of patriarchy and capitalism in the contemporary world. 

Love in the Big City, a bestseller in Korea, is a queer coming-of-age novel about a college student named Young. He and his best friend Jaehee make the most of Tinder and Seoul's vibrant nightlife in their youth, but as she starts to settle down, Young is left to take care of his mother and remains on a quest for true romantic love.

The full International Booker Prize longlist for 2022 includes:

• Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated from Korean by Anton Hur
• After The Sun by Jonas Eika, translated from Danish by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg
• A New Name: Septology VI-VII by Jon Fosse, translated from Norwegian by Damion Searls
• More Than I Love My Life by David Grossman, translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen
• The Book of Mother by Violaine Huisman, translated from French by Leslie Camhi
• Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Samuel Bett and David Boyd
• Paradais by Fernanda Melchor, translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes
• Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park, translated from Korean by Anton Hur
• Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman erikson Pasaribu, translated from Indonesian by Tiffany Tsao
• Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro, translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle
• Phenotypes by Paulo Scott, translated from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
• Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell
• The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft

There are no Canadian authors or translators on the 2022 longlist.

The longlist was chosen out of 135 books submitted to the 2022 judging panel, comprised of translator and chair Frank Wynne, author Merve Emre, writer Petina Gappah, comedian Viv Groskop and translator and author Jeremy Tiang.

 The shortlist will be revealed on April 7, followed by the winner ceremony on May 26.

The 2021 winner was David Diop's novel At Night All Blood Is Black, translated from French by Anna Moschovakis.