Lebanese-Brazilian Author’s ‘Cup of Rage’ Longlisted for 2016 Man Booker International

Lebanese-Brazilian author Raduan Nassar — and his translator, Stefan Tobler — are among the 27 authors and translators who’ve been longlisted for the re-configured 2016 Man Booker International (MBI):

The MBI, which up through 2015 was a prize for an author’s ouvre, like the Nobel, is now styled like the Anglophone Booker, although prize money (and, one hopes, glory) is shared between author and translator.

The 13 books on the longlist were chosen by a five-judge panel from among 155 submissions, and are made up of books written in: French (3), Portuguese (2), German, Finnish, Italian, Turkish, Korean, Indonesian, Chinese, and Japanese.

Among the glittering longlist — Kenzaburo Oe, Orhan Pamuk, Elena Ferrante — is a short book, A Cup of Rage, by an Arab author popular in his native Brazil but lesser known in English. Raduan Nassar’s parents left Lebanon and arrived in Brazil in 1920, more than a decade before the author was born. But his writing is interested in his ancestry, and the longlisted A Cup of Rage is set on the farm of an immigrant Lebanese family in Brazil.

According to the MBI news release, “The judges will announce a shortlist of six books on 14 April with each author and translator receiving £1,000. The winner of the 2016 Prize will be announced on 16 May at a formal dinner at the V & A, with the £50,000 prize being divided equally between the author and the translator of the winning entry.”