On a cool early December morning, Sri Lankan Shehan Karunatilaka arrived in Paris. The 2022 Booker Prize comes from London where it passed the baton to its successor, the 2023 winner, the Irish novelist Paul Lynch. Head to the Deux Magots brasserie for a breakfast with the press. “I’ve been traveling around the world for twelve months and people ask me my opinion on everything, it’s exhausting,” explains, with a smile, the author of Seven Moons by Maali Almeida (Calmann-Lévy). Today is my last day, tomorrow I return to the shadows.”
So, we say to ourselves that we are very lucky to meet this man of handsome stature, whose novel evokes the Sri Lankan civil war of the 1990s via the story of a photographer reporter who has seven days on Earth to unravel the mystery of his own murder. And we are the only ones who can rejoice about it. Indeed, a very small handful of journalists responded to the invitation.
A worrying lack of interest… while publishers continue valiantly to publish the best of foreign literature – despite a slight decline, France remains one of the countries that translates the most, so in 2022, there will still be 11,185 titles of beyond borders (including 3,082 novels, or 28% of novel production). Language barrier, shortage of literary audiovisual broadcasts… the reasons for this disaffection are multiple. However, readers recovered the sales bar in December, with star authors having sold between 10,000 (The Wedding PortraitMaggie O’Farrell) and 55,000 copies (The Wager ShipwrecksDavid Grann), up to 180,000 for Weapons of Light by leading Welshman Ken Follett.
At the start of the 2024 school year, a superb line-up of 134 foreign novelists awaits us. Among them, some big names such as Colum McCann, Barbara Kingsolver (Pulitzer Prize 2023), Mo Yan (Nobel Prize 2012), Russell Banks, Martin Suter, Jon Kalman Stefansson, Arnaldur Indridason, Ia Genberg (August Prize), Mi-ye Lee , a new South Korean gem… Let’s give them a warm welcome.