The Booker Prize Foundation announced the judges for the 2023 International Booker Prize, the prestigious literary award that honors “the best single work of fiction translated into English and published in the U.K. and Ireland.”
Chairing the judging panel will be Leïla Slimani, the French Moroccan novelist known for books including The Perfect Nanny and Adèle.
Book critic Parul Sehgal, who previously wrote for the New York Times and is now on staff at the New Yorker, is also on the panel of judges, along with translator Uilleam Blacker (Oleg Sentsov’s Life Went On Anyway), novelist Tan Twan Eng (The Garden of Evening Mists), and Frederick Studemann, literary editor of the Financial Times.
“As a child, I lived in books,” Slimani said in a statement. “Fiction is my home and I am more than happy to be able to live there for several months, surrounded by friends and colleagues, to celebrate our passion for words and stories. It is a great honor and responsibility to present this prestigious award to a novelist and to his or her translator whose talents have enabled them to be read by English-speaking readers.’
The International Booker Prize was first awarded in 2005. Previous winners have included author Han Kang and translator Deborah Smith for The Vegetarian and author Olga Tokarczuk and translator Jennifer Croft for Flights.
The award comes with a $60,000 cash prize that’s split evenly between the author and translator. The longlist for the award will be announced next March, with a shortlist revealed in April and a winner announced in May.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
