Green Room · selections
45 books recognised by this prize; those with a page and an offer in your market are below · About the prize.
English-language · US offers
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ
A novel presented as the translation of a rediscovered 1950s Japanese travel memoir, following a writer's lecture tour of 1930s colonial Taiwan and her friendship with her interpreter. Rich in food, language and politics.
Banu Mushtaq
Twelve stories of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India, told with colloquial wit and anger, and the first Kannada-language book to win. A good pick if you like short fiction with a strong, lived-in voice.
Jenny Erpenbeck
A 19-year-old student and a married writer decades older begin an affair in East Berlin in 1986, and their relationship tracks the last years of East Germany. It suits readers who like love stories that are also history.
Ana Paula Maia
A short, stark novel set in a Brazilian penal colony that is being closed down, centred on an inmate and an unstable warden. For readers who want bleak, pared-back fiction with moments of tenderness.
Daniel Kehlmann
A freely imagined life of the film director G. W. Pabst and his compromises under the Nazis, moving from Hollywood to the Third Reich. For readers who like historical fiction with a filmmaking backdrop and a moral edge.
Rene Karabash
A narrated-in-first-person story set in a northern Albanian mountain village ruled by the Kanun, where a teenager claims the right to live as a sworn virgin. For readers drawn to dark, intense, dreamlike fiction.
Marie NDiaye
A short, dreamlike novel about a middling witch, her gifted twin daughters and a family unravelling, by one of France's best-known novelists. For readers who like domestic fiction that slides into the uncanny.
Shida Bazyar
Four family members, four decades (1979 to 2009), moving between Iran and Germany, each section in its own voice. Good for readers who like intimate family sagas about exile and revolution.
Vincent Delecroix
A short, concentrated novel narrated by a French coastguard radio operator after a migrant boat sinks in the Channel, built around her attempts to justify herself. Suits readers who want a compact moral drama on a current subject.
Solvej Balle
A rare-book dealer finds herself living the same November day again and again, and the novel follows her careful, diary-like attempts to think her way through it. Suits readers who like speculative premises treated as quiet literary fiction.
Vincenzo Latronico
A deadpan, object-by-object portrait of two creative expats in Berlin over a decade, updating Georges Perec's Things for the Instagram age. Good for readers who enjoy cool, satirical social observation.
Anne Serre
A short, elegiac novel in which a writer called the Narrator tries to gather the life of his childhood friend Fanny, who lives with mental illness. For readers who like brief, controlled, emotionally exact fiction.
Hiromi Kawakami
Fourteen linked stories trace a far-future humanity reshaped by cloning, artificial mothers and strange evolution, in an affectless, childlike voice. A fit for readers of speculative fiction who prefer mood and ideas to plot.
Jente Posthuma
Precise vignettes
Maryse Condé
Playful, humorous tone
Bora Chung
A fit for readers drawn to unsettling, genre-blending short fiction with social commentary and absurdist humor; the publisher describes a mix of horror, science fiction, fairy tales, and speculative fiction.