Eleanor Wachtel to chair 2024 International Booker Prize jury

Esteemed broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel, who recently retired from hosting the CBC Radio show Writers & Company, will chair the 2024 International Booker Prize jury.

The annual award celebrates the best works of fiction from around the world that have been translated into English and published in the U.K. or Ireland. The £50,000 (approx. $83,169 Cdn) grand prize is divided equally between writer and translator.

The prize was set up to boost the profile of fiction in other languages — which accounts for only a small share of books published in Britain — and to salute the underappreciated work of literary translators.

Wachtel is a Canadian writer and broadcaster. She hosted Writers & Company, CBC Radio's flagship literary program, since 1990. Throughout its 33-year run, the one-hour show presented an in-depth look at works of remarkable writers, filmmakers, photographers and artists from around the world.  

Wachtel's interviews for Writers & Company have included literary names such as Carol Shields, Mordecai Richler, John le Carré, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Zadie Smith and many more.

• 33 years of exceptional interviews with the incomparable Eleanor Wachtel

"Over more than 30 years of interviewing the very best international authors, I have come to understand the power of translators to open borders of the imagination and to create a worldwide community of readers. Alongside those writers who speak to us of the culture of their homelands, many of the finest voices also come from diasporic experiences, of displacement and exile. They bring us a bifocal image of the world — where they've come from and where they've landed. The translation of their work into English carries this movement forward. Literature subverts, it questions the lines we draw between people and places, our expectations, revealing an interiority that can change everything," Wachtel said in a press statement.

"I'm so looking forward to sharing these explorations with my fellow judges — an ad hoc book club of renowned writers, artists and readers."

LISTEN | A celebration of Eleanor Wachtel and Writers & Company:

Writers and Company1:35:08Celebrating Writers & Company: 33 years of exceptional interviews with the incomparable Eleanor Wachtel

For Writers & Company's final original episode, Eleanor Wachtel is interviewed on-stage by Matt Galloway, host of CBC Radio's The Current. She then speaks with American authors Brandon Taylor and Gary Shteyngart, and receives surprise greetings from the likes of Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith.

Joining Wachtel on the jury are American poet Natalie Diaz, Sri Lankan novelist Romesh Gunesekera, South African visual artist William Kentridge and Italian writer and translator Aaron Robertson.

Submissions for the international Booker Prize are currently open. Books published in the U.K. or Ireland between May 1, 2023 and April 30, 2024 are eligible. Authors of any nationality are eligible. The longlist, shortlist and winners will be announced in spring 2024.

Last year's winner was Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel for the novel for Time Shelter, a darkly comic novel about the dangerous appeal of nostalgia. Winning the International Booker gave Time Shelter a large sales lift: according to the prize, 20,000 copies were sold in the U.K. in the first 10 days after it won.

With files from the Associated Press and CBC Books