Guadalupe Nettel, nominated for the International Booker Prize for 'The only daughter'

The writer Guadalupe Nettel has been nominated for the International Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the English language, for her novel

, translated by Rosalind Harvey.

The Mexican author has entered the first selection of nominees, which includes 13 narrators from different parts of the world whose works of fiction have been published in the United Kingdom or Ireland in the last year;

the six finalists will be announced on April 18 and the winner on May 23.

In the long list announced this Tuesday, there are also the Guadeloupean Maryse Condé and the Catalan Eva Baltasar.

La hija única

, published in Spanish by Anagrama in 2020 and edited in English by Fritzcarraldo Editions under the title

, explores the "ambivalence" of being a mother in a "sensitive and surgically precise" way, according to the brief description made by the organizers of the award in the announcement.

The novel deals with three different ways of understanding motherhood, Laura's, Alina's and Doris's, and the links they establish between them.

"She was fed up with the traditional happy motherhood," the author said in an interview with EL PAÍS in 2020.

Nettel, 49 years old and born in Mexico City, is also the author of

(2006),

(2011) and won the Herralde Prize for

(2014).

In 2013, she won the Ribera del Duero Short Narrative Award with the storybook

.

She is also director of the

.

Her work has been translated into more than 15 languages ​​and her texts have been published in media such as

or

, as well as EL PAÍS.

The complete list of nominees includes the Catalan Eva Baltasar, with

;

the Guadeloupean Maryse Condé, with

;

the Chinese Zou Jingzhi, with

;

the Swedish Amanda Svensson, with

;

the Indian Perumal Murugan, with

;

the German Clemens Meyer, with

;

the Frenchman Laurent Mauvignier, with

;

the Ukrainian Andrey Kurkov, with

;

the Norwegian Vigdis Hjorth, with

;

to the Ivorian GauZ', with

;

the Bulgarian Georgi Gospodinov, with

, and the South Korean Cheon Myeong-kwan, with

.

Discover the #InternationalBooker2023 longlist: https://t.co/U4KH7EkhZj@andothertweets @EuropaEdUK @WorldEdBooks @wnbooks @orionbooks @maclehosepress @QuercusBooks @VersoBooks @FitzcarraldoEds @PushkinPress @ScribeUKbooks @scribepub @honfordstar pic.twitter.com/rJexD13fhh

— The Booker Prizes (@TheBookerPrizes) March 14, 2023

The award recognizes the best international work of fiction translated into English and is selected from books published in the UK or Ireland between May 1, 2022 and April 30, 2023. The award awards winners £50,000 (1 1 million pesos): 25,000 for the author and 25,000 for the translator.

This year, the jury is chaired by the French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani and made up of Uilleam Blacker, one of the leading British literary translators from Ukrainian;

Tan Twan Eng, Booker-listed Malay novelist;

Parul Sehgal, writer and critic for

, and Frederick Studemann, literary editor for the

.

The International Booker Prize has been awarded since 2005. Initially, under the name of the Man Booker International Prize, it was a biennial prize for a set of works, and it was not stipulated that they should be written in a language other than English.

Among the first winners were Alice Munro, Lydia Davis or Philip Roth.

In 2015, the bases were expanded to allow the participation of writers of any nationality.

Since then, it has been awarded annually to a single book written in another language and translated into English.

In recent years, among the nominees have been Latin American authors such as Mariana Enriquez, Benjamín Labatut, Valeria Luiselli, Fernanda Melchor or Gabriela Cabezón Cámara.

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