The End

"I’ve included him because his short stories are absolutely brilliant. It’s a terrible shame that Anglophone readers have mostly never heard of him because he deserves to be a lot better known in the English-speaking world. It’s this old problem of translation. He’s been translated much more into French and German and Italian, so he’s much better known in continental Europe. He’s been referred to as the Jack London of South America. Or the Herman Melville . His father was a ship’s captain in a whaling station. He grew up on the island of Chiloé, in a very remote place. In his 20s, instead of going to university or college, he worked on a sheep station in Patagonia. So he really knows what he’s talking about. If you want to get a sense of the harsh life in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego at the end of the South American continent, then his stories really hit home. They’re not just about the harshness of the environment, but also the extraordinary human characters who come to a place like that and find a way to survive. Also, he really gives you an idea of what it’s like to live with that extreme loneliness and isolation. It’s probably similar to living on a sheep station in Australia. You’re in the middle of absolutely nowhere. There’s nothing, and you have to rely on yourself and not go insane. But often people do go completely mad down there, from the loneliness or from being stuck with someone else that they can’t stand. Emotions get magnified in those extreme places and his stories are brilliant at characterizing that. I was just rereading one that is not in the book called “La voz del viento”, which in English would probably be “The Call of the Wind”. It’s about a guy who is so lonely on his sheep station—there are almost no women down there—that he decides to go to the nearest town and buy a prostitute’s freedom and bring her back with him. At first, it’s fantastic. She’s grateful to have a life and they’re absolutely thrilled with each other. But very soon they start getting on each other’s nerves, and he starts missing the peace and the solitude that at one point he thought he couldn’t bear. He ends up slitting her throat. Of course he’s sorry once he’s done it, but it’s too late. It’s that kind of a place. It’s a land of extremes and violence can appear at any moment. It’s a tragic story, but it’s also brilliant. A really moving story that is in the translated tales is called “Cururo,” which is about the intensely close relationship between a farmhand and his dog on a remote Fuegian sheep station. Mainly in the 1940s and 1950s, so a long time ago. But to this day, there are still sheep stations and incredibly lonely places down there. There are hermits living in the Patagonian ice fields for whatever reason. That loneliness and extreme survival mode, and people getting on each other’s nerves in that situation: those are still experiences that you can have today. I’ve travelled there with my sons, and it’s tough when you’re all alone, 1,000 miles from the nearest comfortable bed. Tempers flare. It’s a pleasure. I hope people will be inspired to look for these books because they’re not necessarily recently published or that easy to find, but they’re really worth looking for, and they will give you a lot about Chile."

"It’s a portrait of the artist as a young man, a Künstlerroman, by a writer who is also a photographer. One of the things that we all loved as judges—and this was when I was judging with the novelist and translator, Maureen Freely and the international lawyer and writer, Philippe Sands—is the innovative, engaging structure of this novel. We’d never come across anything quite like it. It’s like a collage of vignettes or small chapters—a novel written in snapshots, freely associating and making connections between them. They’re like memories, in a way, and often very visual. It’s natural. It’s the way we all think, but it’s not usual to see a novel structured in that way. Because the author is a photographer as well, he’s using these different ways of looking and thinking. In a way, it’s autobiographical. Not in the facts, but in the emotions. It’s about a father-son relationship of conflict. The author was born into the Hungarian minority in Romania and moved as a teenager with his father to Budapest. His protagonist was born more than 25 years before him, yet he also moves from a part of Hungary to the capital, Budapest, as a teenager with his father. It’s a novel about the consequences of communist rule in Hungary, in an atmosphere of spies and informers and the sort of Faustian pact that everyone is under pressure to make: to inform on their fellow citizens, on people in the family. It’s about the pressures that that creates on individuals. The protagonist’s father has been imprisoned as a dissident—as indeed was the author’s father. It’s looking at the lasting damage created in a society, in a family, to individuals, by this kind of system at a very micro level. And yet… you asked me about happy endings. One can talk about the police state and these traumatic memories and so on. But it’s also about an artist. Like all these books, it’s about the transcendence of art, because writing the novel in the face of this is itself a triumph. It’s taking a look at art and what that means in a society—how important it is everywhere, but also in these particular regimes. It has an incredibly upbeat ending, which you don’t really expect. I won’t say exactly what happens. At the beginning, there’s a 50-year-old man, a fairly well-known photographer, who is awaiting a diagnosis for something that could or could not be cancer. From there, he goes off into his memories of childhood, of his family, his terrible relationship with his father, the death of his mother, and yet, by the end, through his freely associated memories, you’re brought to a place of quite a lot of light and happiness. The movement of the novel defies the idea that you have to succumb to regimes of that kind. One final thing to mention: The End was published by Archipelago Books in New York. 2024 was the year the prize was expanded to include North American as well as UK and European publishers. From this year, eligible books can also have been published anywhere the Bank invests, including in African economies. So that’s quite significant, and gives a more global view of the state of translation into English by eligible authors. The translation needs to be new and published in the past year. But the book can be older. In this case, the translation was published in 2023 and the original was written in 2015. The author must be living at the time the book is submitted. There are a lot of books in some of these literatures that are just beginning to come out in English translation, and the author may have long died, but this isn’t a prize for classics. It’s a prize for living authors and new translations."