Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has been selected the winner of this year’s Man Booker International Prize for their debut novel, The Discomfort of Evening. Dutch author Rijneveld and English-language translator Michele Hutchison will share equally in the £50,000 prize.
A bestselling sensation in the Netherlands, The Discomfort of Evening is a highly original and extraordinary portrait of a family distorted by grief. 10-year-old Jas lives with her devout farming family in the rural Netherlands. One winter’s day, her older brother joins an ice skating trip. Resentful at being left alone, she makes a perverse plea to God; he never returns. As grief overwhelms the farm, Jas succumbs to a vortex of increasingly disturbing fantasies.
Ted Hodgkinson, chair of the 2020 Man Booker International Prize judging panel, says: ‘Combining a disarming new sensibility with a translation of singular sensitivity, The Discomfort of Evening is a tender and visceral evocation of a childhood caught between shame and salvation, and a deeply deserving winner of The 2020 International Booker Prize.’’
At 29, Rijneveld is the youngest author to win The International Booker Prize and already an award-winning novelist and poet in the Netherlands. Similar to the character Jas in their fiction, Rijneveld grew up in a strict religious community in a rural area and lost their brother as a child. They continue to work on a dairy farm today, alongside their writing.
Hutchison, who shares equally in the award money as translator, is a prominent translator of Dutch literature and also translated from French. A former commissioning editor from various publishing houses, ahe was born in England but now resides in the Netherlands.
The Man Booker International Prize is awarded every year for a single book, which is translated into English and published in the UK. Read more about the Prize here.
