Vladimir Sorokin and Intizar Husain nominated for Man Booker International Prize 2013
We’d like to congratulate Intizar Husain and Vladimir Sorokin on being named finalists for the Man Booker International Prize 2013. The prize “recognises one writer for his or her achievement in fiction. Worth £60,000, the prize is awarded every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language. The winner is chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel and there are no submissions from publishers.”
Vladimir Sorokin is the author of The Queue and Ice Trilogy, both available as NYRB Classics, and Days of the Oprichnik. Trained as an engineer for the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, Sorokin later turned to writing and became a major presence in Moscow’s literary underground in the 1980s. Banned in the Soviet Union, his work has since been translated into more than twenty languages and awarded several prestigious prizes, including the Andrei Bely Prize for outstanding contribution to Russian literature in 2001. Sorokin lives in Moscow.
Intizar Husain is a journalist, short-story writer, and novelist, widely considered the most significant living fiction writer in Urdu. He is the author of the story collections Leaves, The Seventh Door, A Chronicle of the Peacocks, and An Unwritten Epic. Basti, a novel in which the psychic history of Pakistan is traced through the story of a single man, was published as an NYRB Classic in December. Pankaj Mishra called it “a haunting modernist echo chamber of voices from Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic traditions.” Husain currently lives in Lahore, Pakistan.
Also nominated for the Man Booker International Prize is Lydia Davis, whose translation of Vivant Denon’s No Tomorrow is available from NYRB Classics.
