Marieke Lucas Rijneveld is the first Dutchman to win the International Booker Prize | Inland

“It is a great honor to receive the International Booker Prize 2020, I can only say that I am as proud as a cow with seven udders!” was the reaction of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld to the announcement by Booker jury chairman Ted Hodgkinson.

The champagne corks popped at the Atlas Contact publishing house. “I am very happy that this phenomenally beautiful debut has received the worldwide recognition it deserves because of this award. I hope The evening is inconvenience gets a lot of readers in the 21 countries where it appears. The employees of Atlas Contact have intensely sympathized with Marieke Lucas in recent months and are now again very proud of her fantastic performance, ”said publisher Sander Blom.

Rijneveld shares this great honor with the British translator of her book, Michele Hutchison (1972). The prize money, 50,000 British pounds, must also be shared fairly between the author and the translator. After all, the aim of the award is precisely to emphasize the importance of a good translation.

Last year Tommy Wieringa was also in the race for this prize. Were it not for his current novel Murat Idrissi’s death dropped out in the last round and didn’t make it to the shortlist. In 2007 Harry Mulisch also missed out on the International Booker Prize.

Young talent

Rijneveld, born in 1991, who feels like a boy and a girl and has therefore added Lucas to her official first name Marieke, has been regarded for years as one of the greatest young talents in Dutch literature. In 2015 she released a collection of poems for the first time, Veal fleece entitled, which was immediately nominated with the C. Buddingh Prize for the best poetry debut. Her first novel was published three years later The evening is inconvenience, which was awarded the ANV Debutantenprijs. The book also got a place on the long list of the Libris Literature Prize 2019. In the Netherlands and Belgium 80,000 copies have now been sold.

Rijneveld, who combines her writing with a job on a dairy farm near Utrecht, grew up in a Brabant family from a Reformed home. It is such an oppressive environment that also forms the basis of the young girl Jas, the main character in The evening is inconvenience. The child is struggling with great grief. Her brother drowned in a skating accident. And she thinks she is to blame, because she prayed to God to spare her rabbit for Christmas dinner and rather take her brother.

Lof

The girl tries to allay the pain and sorrow with strange, sexual, sometimes morbid experiments on animals, which Rijneveld describes in a poetic, visual way. The story is gritty and grim, sometimes even gruesome. However, the British critics, like many Dutch critics, were full of praise for her debut. The Guardian named it one of the ten best translated books of the year. And The Irish Times described it as “a book you won’t soon forget.”

It is certain that Rijneveld will be able to attract an even larger readership by winning the prize. Not just in Great Britain, but all over the English-speaking world. The International Booker Prize has an excellent reputation. Previous laureates include such luminaries as Philip Roth, Alice Munro, Olga Tokarzcuk and David Grossman.

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