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Rijneveld wins International Booker Prize

Dutch author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has won the £50,000 (A$91,310) International Booker Prize for their debut novel The Discomfort of Evening (trans by Michele Hutchinson, Faber), reports the Bookseller.

Rijneveld’s book tells the story of Jas and her devout farming family in a strict Christian community in rural Netherlands. Judges said Rijneveld’s language ‘renders the world anew, revealing the shocks and violence of early youth through the prism of a Dutch dairy farm’.

‘Combining a disarming new sensibility with a translation of singular sensitivity, The Discomfort of Evening is a tender and visceral evocation of a childhood caught between shame and salvation, and a deeply deserving winner of the 2020 International Booker Prize,’ said chair of judges Ted Hodgkinson.

The Dutch edition of The Discomfort of Evening was first released in 2018, and has since become a bestseller in the Netherlands. Faber acquired world English-language rights to the novel in a three-way auction in September 2019.

As previously reported by Books+Publishing, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Australian author Shokoofeh Azar (Wild Dingo Press) was also shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize. Azar was the first Australian writer to be shortlisted for the prize since it restructured as an annual translation award in 2015.

 

Category: International news