THE IDIOT by Elif Batuman (Penguin Press) SIGHT by Jessie Greengrass (Hogarth, to be published 8/21/18) HOME FIRE by Kamila Shamsie (Riverhead) View the complete Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018 shortlist here. The Women’s Prize for Fiction winning title will be revealed at an awards ceremony in London on June 6 – the author taking home £30,000 and a bronze figurine, “the Bessie.”

  THE WHITE BOOK by Han Kang (South Korea), translated by Deborah Smith (Hogarth to publish in the U.S. in Spring 2019) FRANKENSTEIN IN BAGHDAD by Ahmed Saadawi (Iraq), translated by Jonathan Wright (Penguin Books published in the U.S. 1/23/18) FLIGHTS by Olga Tokarczuk (Poland), translated by Jennifer Croft (Riverhead Books to publish in the U.S. 8/14/18) View the complete Man Booker International Prize 2018 shortlist here. The panel of judges included two Penguin Random House authors: Hari Kunzru, whose most recent book is WHITE TEARS (Vintage), and Helen Oyeyemi, whose most recent book is WHAT IS NOT YOUR IS NOT YOURS (Riverhead). The winner of the 2018 prize will be announced on May 22 at an awards dinner at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, with the £50,000 prize being divided equally between the author and the translator of the winning book. In addition, each shortlisted author and translator will share £1,000 each.

Riverhead Vice President, Editorial Director Rebecca Saletan accepted the award on Hamid’s behalf at the awards ceremony on Tuesday night at the Morgan Library in Manhattan. Afterwards, Saletan talked with NPR’s Linda Holmes about EXIT WEST. You can find out more about the ceremony and watch Mohsin Hamid’s recorded speech here. Among Hamid’s remarks: "I'm really grateful to be honored by this prize in particular, which is a prize that looks to books to have an impact on the world." In a conversation with NPR host Michel Martin during the evening, Arimah gave advice to new writers: “Be radically honest with yourself and with everyone else.”

The Story Prize runners-up – Daniel Alarcón for THE KING IS ALWAYS ABOVE THE PEOPLE  (Riverhead Books) and Ottessa Moshfegh for HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD  (Penguin Press) – were also honored and each received $5,000. Three independent Story Prize judges – Knopf/Vintage author and poet Susan Minot, critic and author Walton Muyumba, and Library Journal Associate Editor Stephanie Sendaula – selected the three finalists from among 120 submissions representing 93 different publishers or imprints, and then determined the winner. Warm congratulations to Ms. Strout, her editor and publisher.

[caption id="attachment_9400" align="alignright" width="200"] Francisco Cantu, credit Beowulf Sheehan[/caption] What inspired you to become a writer and chronicle your life experiences on the page? FC: What initially led me to become a writer was the need to make sense of the years I spent working as a Border Patrol agent. I signed up for the job after college, looking for answers to all the questions I encountered in my studies of immigration and border policy.  I was looking for the something that would bring me close to the border, something that would let me experience it to its fullest extent. The Border Patrol seemed like the only way to do that, to witness the harsh day-to-day realities of the border, to be out in the desert day in and day out. The job, of course, was a violent one, in ways that were both obvious and more subtle. Instead of finding the answers I was looking for, I ended up coming away with more questions, and that’s what led me to writing—it became a compulsion, something I had to do in order to come to terms with all the complicated ways my work had caused me to normalize and participate in structural violence. How did you discover this author and what were your first impressions of the manuscript for this book? RS: I received an early draft of the book on submission in late September 2016, weeks before the election. Although we did not know then how large the border would loom in the national conversation, I could not stop thinking about it. Sometimes projects move so quickly editors don’t have time to see how the reading experience sits with us, but because the author was coming up from Tucson to meet with interested publishers, I had a little time to take my own temperature. What stayed with me was the understated force of the storytelling. I felt haunted by it, the way the US-Mexican border—the border whose line becomes a river—haunts America. The way the past and the present and the fate of those on both sides of it are inextricably entwined, no matter how high a wall we build. [caption id="attachment_9401" align="alignleft" width="300"] Rebecca Saletan, credit Louie Saletan[/caption] What was involved in working with Francisco during the editorial process? RS: I like to say that editing is 99 percent deletion, taking out what doesn’t need to be there, creating white space for the reader’s emotional response. But in this case what was needed was to imagine what wasn’t yet there that would help deepen and sharpen the arc of the narrative without making it heavy-handed.  I thought readers needed to feel a little more the effect of Cantú’s experience on him so that we could feel its effect on us. That meant judiciously adding material: signal moments from his childhood, his family background, and the deeper history of the border itself. These elements, which he deftly wove in, amplify the narrative and allow the reader to accompany him toward a kind of reckoning that we don’t see coming until it is upon us. What takeaways do you hope readers will glean from your book? FC: If nothing else, I want readers to come away feeling that the border is a place that is immensely complex and nuanced, to the extent that they reject simplified rhetoric about immigration and border policy. I think it’s important at this particular moment to take stock of all the things that are missing from our conversation about the border, such as the actual human costs of our current policy. People seem to forget that migrants are dying in the desert, and it’s not a small number, we’re talking about hundreds of people each year, and those are just the ones that get reported. Our current policy of “enforcement through deterrence” has weaponized the landscape, pushing people to cross in the most rugged and inhospitable terrain there is. There’s a humanitarian crisis occurring at our border but we don’t seem to recognize it as such—we don’t acknowledge the people who are dying there, we don’t name their bodies, we don’t mourn their deaths. That’s unacceptable; it has to change. We have to understand each number in each statistic as representing an individual life.