Two of Israel’s best-known novelists up for Man Booker prize

Amos Oz and David Grossman are both shortlisted for this year’s coveted international prize, the most prestigious literary award for works of translated fiction.

Two of Israel’s best-known and most lauded novelists, Amos Oz and David Grossman, have been shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker International prize, the most prestigious literary award for works of translated fiction.

Oz’s latest book, Judas, translated by his long-time collaborator, Nicholas de Lange, and set in Jerusalem of the late 1950s, makes the list of six novels, as does David Grossman’s painfully comic A Horse Walks Into A Bar, translated by Jessica Cohen.

Each shortlisted author and translator receives £1,000 ahead of the overall winner, which will be announced in London on June 14. The winner and translator will share the £50,000 prize.

It is only the second year of the international award; Amos Oz was previously shortlisted in 2007. He and David Grossman are in competition with a writer from South America, Samanta Schweblin, and three from Europe: two Scandinavians, Roy Jacobsen and Dorthe Nors and a Prix Goncourt winner, Mathias Enard from France.

The shortlist was selected by a panel of five judges, chaired by Nick Barley, director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and consisting of: Daniel Hahn, an award-winning writer, editor and translator; Elif Shafak, a prize-winning novelist and one of the most widely read writers in Turkey; Chika Unigwe, author of four novels including On Black Sisters’ Street; and Helen Mort, a poet who has been shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize and the Costa Prize, and has won a Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award five times.