Jokha Alharthi, the first female Omani novelist to be translated into English, has won the Man Booker International prize for her novel ‘Celestial Bodies’. The novel tells the story of three sisters of a desert country confronting its slave-owning past and a complex modern world.
- Jokha Alharthi is the first Arabic-language writer to take the prize, and the prize will split the 50,000 pounds or 64,000 US dollar purse with her UK-based translator, Marilyn Booth.
- Celestial Bodies is set in the Omani village of al-Awafi and follows the stories of three sisters: Mayya, who marries into a rich family after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries for duty; and Khawla, waiting for a man who has emigrated to Canada.
- “Celestial Bodies” beat five other finalists from Europe and South America, including last year’s winner, Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk. The prize is a counterpart to the Man Booker Prize for English-language novels and is open to books in any language that has been translated into English.
About Man Booker International
- The Man Booker Prize is the leading literary award in the English speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for five decades. Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK. It is a prize that transforms the winner’s career.
- The Man Booker Prize is sponsored by Man Group and the winner receives £50,000 as well as the £2,500 awarded to each of the six shortlisted authors. Both the winner and the shortlisted authors are guaranteed a worldwide readership plus a dramatic increase in book sales.
- The Man Booker International Prize was established in 2005 and in 2016 became a prize for fiction in translation, awarded annually for a single work, translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland.
- Underlining the importance of translation, the £50,000 prize is divided equally between the author and the translator.
- Together the Man Booker Prize and the Man Booker International Prize reward the best fiction in any year, whether written originally in or translated into English, and published in the UK or Ireland.
