The Remainder

"A story from Chile , mainly Santiago. It’s highly original, very political, with a totally wonderful use of words. The words are perfectly turned. It’s one of those books where the skill of the wordsmithery tumbles you into new stories, into shared experiences. Again, a very, very lyrical translation as well. The subject was fairly morbid—the moving of a corpse across national boundaries. It says something about the age we live in that the dead—often in car boots as a result of civil war or political conflict or oppression—appeared a number of times in a number of the books submitted. “The skill of the wordsmithery tumbles you into new stories” Fascinating that this was crowd-funded. There was an acuity, an overwhelming freshness that saturated every page. It appealed to us as a panel because it looked at historical memory, how we remember what’s happened to us, and how we respond to the memories that we inherit. It’s fundamentally about how children and the next generation try to escape shadows of all kinds, particularly political activism. So yeah, a lovely surprise of a work. I think it’s fantastic that our prize honours translators, both in a pecuniary sense and in terms of the plaudits—that they’re given in an equal way to the authors. That’s a really great thing. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Translators have a very important job; they’re often working as kind of scouts. It’s quite often the translators who bring works to publishers, so they are very active within the industry. My overarching historical and philosophical approach to life is that, as a social species, we’re lucky enough to be the inheritors and recipients of so many different minds, and the workings of so many different minds, and the hopes and fears and ideas and ideals and inspirations of others. The fact that that’s played out so acutely in a translated work seems to be, in a way, a very good metaphor for how we should live our lives."