It’s been a busy week in international literary awards, with two major book awards announced — the Booker Prize for (English-language) fiction, shared this year by The Testaments (Margaret Atwood) and Girl, Woman, Other (Bernardine Evaristo), and the German Book Prize, which went to Herkunft, by Saša Stanišić — as well as two of the major international author awards, the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Amusingly, because they skipped announcing a Nobel winner last year, the Swedish Academy played catch-up and announced both a 2018 winner, and one for 2019 — Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke, respectively. And now they’ve announced the winner of next year’s Neustadt Prize (which is a biennial prize, the announcement in one year, the actual awarding and festivities following in the next), as Ismail Kadare Wins Prestigious 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Long-established, even in English translation, authors Handke and Kadare of course got fairly extensive coverage in my The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction, but I’m pleased to note (and boast) that I even mentioned Tokarczuk — several year before the beginning of her English-language breakthrough Flights was even published in translation.
The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction 