The Birthday Party Longlisted for the International Booker Prize
We're delighted to share that The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier, translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker, has been longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. This year’s longlist spans 11 languages, with the winner of the £50,000 prize—split evenly between author and translator—to be announced on May 23. The full list of nominated titles includes:
Boulder by Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches)
Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan (tr. Chi-Young Kim)
The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé (tr. Richard Philcox)
Standing Heavy by GauZ’ (tr. Frank Wynne)
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov (tr. Angela Rodel)
Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth (tr. Charlotte Barslund)
Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv by Andrey Kurkov (tr. Rueben Woolley)
The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier (tr. Daniel Levin Becker)
While We Were Dreaming by Clemens Meyer (tr. Katy Derbyshire)
Pyre by Perumal Murugan (tr. Aniruddhan Vasudevan)
Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel (tr. Rosalind Harvey)
A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding by Amanda Svensson (tr. Nichola Smalley)
Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi (tr. Jeremy Tiang)
The panel of judges is chaired by the prize-winning French-Moroccan novelist, Leïla Slimani. The panel also includes Uilleam Blacker, one of Britain’s leading literary translators from Ukrainian; Tan Twan Eng, the Booker-shortlisted Malaysian novelist; Parul Sehgal, staff writer and critic at the New Yorker; and Frederick Studemann, Literary Editor of the Financial Times.
About The Birthday Party
Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family’s farm; his wife, Marion; their daughter, Ida; and their neighbor, Christine, an artist. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife’s fortieth birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet’s quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers stalk the houses, unleashing a nightmarish chain of events.
Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the next over the course of a day, Laurent Mauvignier’s The Birthday Party is a deft unraveling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, written by a major contemporary French writer.
Laurent Mauvignier was born in Tours in 1967. He is the author of several novels in French and is the winner of four literary prizes, including the Prix Wepler.
Daniel Levin Becker is the author of Many Subtle Channels and What’s Good, the translator of books including Georges Perec’s La Boutique Obscure and Eduardo Berti’s An Ideal Presence, and the youngest member of the Oulipo.
