The Shortlist of the Year 2017

“Urgent, acute, almost live: in this gesture the books shortlisted this year negotiate vastly diverging modes of existence, heterogeneous worlds and issues that have to be addressed without delay. Among them are war, encounters within the postcolonial, bodies in authoritarian regimes, the void left behind by totalitarianism, obvious and subtle metamorphoses. The formal scope is wide: prose miniatures, stories, a fictionalized biography and novels. What connects the diversity of topics and modes of expression of all shortlisted titles is their literary energy. It creates it’s very own arc of suspense: universal questions arise from the specific viewpoints of the individual texts that reach far beyond their situational anchorage.”
— The Jury