The 2021 Shortlist

This shortlist honors the new voices of an international literature in which boundaries between the self and the world are shifting ever faster in our decentered globalized existence. It consists of six books that mine everyday life for our deepest fears, that boldly refuse to forget, that probe our technology- and capitalism-steeped relationships, and that seek to combine identities that seem irreconcilable. Wuhan, New York, Cancún and Copenhagen, the banlieues of Paris, Tehran, the Nevada desert and Siberia are settings for this literary world whose willful resistance invokes our most immediate present.

– Michael Götting for the jury