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The nominees for the translated fiction award “don’t shut down debate, they generate it,” said the author Max Porter, who leads the judging panel.
April 8, 2025, 9:11 a.m. ET
A satire of expatriate life in trendy Berlin, a tale of an antiquarian book dealer stuck in a time loop, and a fictionalized retelling of a migrant boat tragedy in the English Channel, are among the six titles that will compete for this year’s International Booker Prize, the award’s organizers announced on Tuesday.
Perhaps the highest profile title on the shortlist for the prize for fiction translated into English is Solvej Balle’s “On the Calculation of Volume: 1” about a bookseller who relives the same day over and over again.
Balle’s novel, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, was a nominee for last year’s National Book Award for translated literature, and many critics have raved about it since its release last year. Hilary Leichter, in a review for the The New York Times, said that in Balle’s hands “the time-loop narrative takes on new and stunning proportions.”
The six shortlisted titles — four of which are under 200 pages — also include Vincenzo Latronico’s “Perfection,” translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes, about an expatriate couple living in a hip Berlin neighborhood and struggling to engage with life outside their bubble. Ryan Ruby, in a review for The Times, said that “with ethnographic precision, Latronico taxonomizes the tastes, attitudes, vanities and blind spots of the people we now call digital nomads.”
