The International Booker Prize 2021

David Diop’s haunting novel follows a Senegalese soldier fighting for France during the First World War. As grief and guilt consume him, the boundaries between sanity and madness collapse. Diop’s prose is rhythmic and incantatory, echoing oral storytelling traditions. The novel exposes the brutality of colonial exploitation and the dehumanising machinery of war. Violence becomes both external and internal. Short, intense, and unforgettable.

Labatut’s book blends fact and fiction to explore scientific genius and obsession. Focusing on figures in mathematics and physics, it examines the moral costs of knowledge. The writing is lucid yet unsettling, revealing how discovery can shade into destruction. Certainty dissolves into ambiguity. The book challenges the myth of progress. Mesmerising and disquieting.

This genre-defying work blends memoir, essay, and historical investigation to explore memory and inheritance. Stepanova traces her family history alongside Russia’s turbulent past. The book questions how stories are preserved and who controls narrative truth. Its structure mirrors the fragility of recollection. Erudite yet deeply personal, it resists closure. A profound meditation on memory itself.

This collection of short stories blends horror with social realism in contemporary Argentina. Enríquez uses the uncanny to expose gendered violence, poverty, and political trauma. Her prose is vivid and unsettling, lingering on dread rather than shock. Ordinary spaces become sites of menace. The stories refuse neat explanations. Dark, gripping, and fiercely original.

Minor Detail reconstructs a violent incident from two perspectives separated by time. Shibli’s restrained prose intensifies the horror of what is left unsaid. The novel interrogates power, erasure, and historical narrative. Silence becomes a form of violence. The structure is precise and devastating. A quiet but searing political novel.

The Employees is a fragmented, speculative novel set aboard a spaceship staffed by humans and humanoids. Told through witness statements, it explores labour, emotion, and the nature of consciousness. Ravn’s minimalist style sharpens its philosophical questions. The line between human and object blurs. The book critiques corporate logic and alienation. Cool, strange, and quietly devastating.

This novel explores the bond between two brothers during a final summer together. As illness and dependency reshape their relationship, love becomes complicated and fragile. Robben writes with emotional clarity and restraint. The perspective of youth heightens vulnerability. The novel captures tenderness without sentimentality. Quiet, moving, and intimate.

Vuillard’s novella recounts the sixteenth-century peasant revolts led by Thomas Müntzer. Written with urgency and clarity, it connects historical struggle to contemporary inequality. Vuillard strips history of neutrality, emphasising power and repression. The prose is sharp and polemical. Past and present echo each other insistently. A brief but forceful work of political history-fiction.

Set in post-Soviet Georgia, this novel follows a teenage girl in a state-run institution for disabled children. Ekvtimishvili writes with restraint and compassion, avoiding sentimentality. The book exposes systemic neglect and quiet resilience. Small acts of care carry great weight. The narrative is spare but deeply affecting. A powerful portrait of dignity under constraint.

This verse novel retells a foundational Gikuyu myth about the origins of a people. Ngũgĩ blends oral tradition with epic poetry, celebrating community and resilience. The narrative foregrounds women’s strength and collective identity. Myth becomes a living political and cultural force. The language is rhythmic and ceremonial. A powerful affirmation of storytelling as inheritance.

This fragmented novel portrays marginalised lives in a Scandinavian city through shifting perspectives. Tichý explores addiction, exclusion, and systemic failure with brutal honesty. The prose is raw and disjointed, reflecting fractured realities. The book resists narrative comfort. Voices overlap without resolution. Bleak, demanding, and ethically confrontational.

This book catalogues lost places, objects, and people through a series of lyrical essays. Schalansky blends personal reflection with historical research. Absence becomes the central subject. The prose is elegant and precise. Each entry mourns what cannot be recovered. A beautiful meditation on loss and impermanence.

This surreal novel depicts life in a grotesque, shifting slum where reality constantly destabilises. Can Xue uses absurdity to critique social and political systems. Characters dissolve into symbols, resisting interpretation. The prose is unsettling and dreamlike. Meaning remains deliberately elusive. A challenging work of radical imagination.