“The Discomfort of Evening” by Dutch Author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld Wins 2020 International Booker Prize

London: The Discomfort of Evening, written by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison, has won the 2020 International Booker Prize.

29-year-old Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has become the youngest to win the International Booker.

The £50,000 prize will be split between Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and Michele Hutchison, giving both the author and translator equal recognition.

The Discomfort of Evening was chosen from a shortlist of six books during a lengthy and rigorous judging process, by a panel of five judges, chaired by Ted Hodgkinson, Head of Literature and Spoken Word at Southbank Centre.

The Discomfort of Evening tells the story of Jas and her devout farming family in a strict Christian community in rural Netherlands. One winter’s day, her older brother joins an ice skating trip. Resentful at being left alone, she attempts to bargain with God pitting the life of her pet rabbit against that of her brother; he never returns. As grief overwhelms the farm, Jas succumbs to a vortex of increasingly disturbing fantasies, watching her family disintegrate into a darkness that threatens to derail them all.

The Guardian described The Discomfort of Evening as ‘an unflinching study of a family falling apart in the madness of grief, rendered all the more unnerving for the childishly plain, undramatic way their compulsive behaviours are reported’. The Financial Times said ‘there is a bold beauty to the book… by using Jas’s everyday world as a metaphor for loneliness and fear, Rijneveld has created something exceptional.’ Megan Nolan for the New Statesman commented that the character of Jas ‘produces a truly haunting and savage loneliness, communicated by Rijneveld with an agile intensity I have rarely encountered.’

The International Booker Prize is awarded every year for a single book that is translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. It aims to encourage more publishing and reading of quality fiction from all over the world and to promote the work of translators. Both novels and short-story collections are eligible.

This year the judges considered 124 books, translated from 30 languages.