Ibtisam Azem’s ‘Book of Disappearance’ Makes 2025 International Booker Longlist
FEBRUARY 25, 2025 — Ibtisam Azem’s Book of Disappearance, translated by Sinan Antoon, has made the thirteen-book longlist for the 2025 International Booker.
Azem’s Book of Disappearance was published in Antoon’s translation by Syracuse University Press in 2018 and happily got a second life when it came out from UK publisher And Other Stories in 2024.
Azem’s novel centers on the sudden disappearance of all Palestinians living across historic Palestine, both in occupied territories and Israel. In a talk last year with ArabLit’s Rahael Mathews, Azem said:
At first, it may seem that the novel is grappling with a basic question: how would settler-colonial societies (in this case Israeli, but this applies to the US, or other cases), whose foundational myth is premised on the erasure of the “other” and the enemy? How would they deal with the sudden disappearance of this other?
But the novel goes further in trying to recenter marginalized narratives and their meanings. It delves into what befell Palestinians after the Nakba of 1948 and its continuity until today, and how it still affects their lives. It is at once a “fantastic” event and a warning of a future scenario that might very well take place (and is, in a way, taking place in Gaza now with all the annihilation and displacement), but also a reflection of what took place and is still taking place.
Today’s International Booker news release noted that the books by this year’s longlistees were compact — with 11 of the 13 under 250 pages — and diverse. The longlisted books were written by authors representing fifteen nationalities and translated from 10 different languages, including, for the first time, Kannada and Romanian.
There were also eleven indie publishers on the list, they wrote; the highest of any year.
The complete longlist:
A Leopard-Skin Hat, by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson
On a Woman’s Madness, by Astrid Roemer, translated by Lucy Scott
Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi
Perfection, by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes
Eurotrash, by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles
Under the Eye of the Big Bird, by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda
Hunchback, by Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton
Small Boat, by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson
Reservoir Bitches, by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary
Solenoid, by , translated by Sean Cotter
On the Calculation of Volume I, by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland
The Book of Disappearance, by Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan Antoon
In a prepared statement, Max Porter, Chair of the International Booker Prize 2025 judges, said that, as judges were making the longlist, they were guided by the questions: “How are people making sense of these times using the novel as a vehicle for thought and feeling? And how are translators taking these books and – in English – making them sing or scream?”
The £50,000 prize money is divided equally: £25,000 for the author and £25,000 for the translator; there is a also prize of £5,000 for each of the shortlisted titles. The 2025 shortlist of six books is set to be announced on Tuesday, April 9, with the winner announced at a ceremony at London’s Tate Modern on Tuesday, May 20.