'This is a fantastically vigorous and vital aspect of the way fiction is being written at the moment,' said jury chair Lucy Hughes-Hallett, a cultural historian and novelist.

This was a year in which new hybrid genres combined essay and memoir with fiction and history writing in novel new ways. With previous winners including the 2018 Nobel literature laureate, Olga Tokarczuk, the International Booker Prize has become a high watermark for emerging literary talent globally that has been published in English. This powerful meditation on the French colonial experience was an attempt to use literature to 'mov people before they turn to rational explanations of history,' Diop told The New York Times. After Alfa is left alone in the trenches to witness the carnage, he throws himself maniacally into combat and descends into madness. The novel tells the story of Senegalese men from the countryside who are enlisted to fight for France on the Western Front during World War I.

Translator Anna Moschovakis quoted writer and translator John Keane to affirm the principle of cultural diversity that is central to the International Booker. 'What does it mean to be together without being the same, to fully accept the idea of difference,' she said. He is the first French and the first African writer to win the prize. 'I am at once flattered and I sort of feel as though I am living in a dream - a waking dream,' said Diop, an author and academic who in 2018 won one of France's major literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens, for his novel Frere d'ame.

The prize was presented at the Coventry Cathedral in the UK City of Culture 2021. The French-Senegalese writer and academic David Diop has taken home the International Booker Prize for a novel translated into English from another language.Īt Night All Blood is Black, a novel by French-Senagalese writer David Diop, translated from French by Anna Moschovakis, has won the International Booker Prize.

At night all blood is black book