29-year-old Dutch author, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s debut novel The Discomfort of Evening has officially won the 2020 International Booker Prize, the youngest winner so far to take home the esteemed £50,000 prize.
The International Booker is an award given every year to a novel translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. In the past, winners have included Omani author Jokha Alharthi for Celestial Bodies, translated by Marilyn Booth from Arabic and South Korean author Han Kang for her work The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith. The prize is a means of showing that storytelling and the magical world of literature transcends languages and cultures, giving us a way of accessing the lives of different places and characters from the comfort of our own home. The 2020 winner was due to be announced on 19 May, however, due to the impact of coronavirus, the news was postponed until yesterday afternoon.
Described as a “tender and visceral evocation of the strangeness of a childhood caught between shame and salvation”, The Discomfort of Evening is a bestseller in the Netherlands, translated into English by Michele Hutchison who will receive half the awards prize alongside Rijneveld. Following Jas, a girl in a devout Christian farming family whose brother dies in an accident after the protagonist wishes he would die, The Discomfort of Evening is a fascinating novel about the damaging effects of grief on a family. The novel is also incredibly biographical in nature, as Rijneveld had a 10 year old brother die when they were three, also growing up in a strict religious community in a rural area of the Netherlands.
Rijneveld beat five other works on the short-list, including:
- The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar
- The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara.
- Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann
- Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
- The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
124 books, translated from 30 languages were also considered.
In their acceptance speech, Rijneveld stated “I can only say that I am as proud as a cow with seven udders”, calling the prize “a great honour.” When speaking of the work that went into creating the novel and bringing it to life, they spoke of how they wrote the words “be relentless” on the wall above their desk: “today, when the world has been turned upside down and is showing its dark side, I often remember those words. So, write, read, win, lose, love each other, but be relentless in this.”
Ted Hodgkinson, chair of the International Booker’s judges said that it was an immensely difficult task to decide on a winner from the strong short-list they were presented with. However, the judges were “unanimous in appreciation” for Rijneveld’s “visceral and virtuosic” novel. Hodgkinson states that the novel “absolutely arrests your attention, dealing with some very difficult aspects of life – the sudden death of a brother, a family grieving, some of the more unyielding aspects of a religious upbringing, the quite stark backdrop of a Dutch dairy farm which can be quite a tough place for a child.” He also added that Rijneveld’s novel is an “undeniable force”, brimming with “thrilling talent and ability.”
A well-deserved winner of an esteemed prize, Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening illustrates the power and capability of literature and the world of work in translation that the International Booker prize looks to celebrate.
Words by Lucy Lillystone
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