Daniel Hahn: The man sitting in judgment 
on the world’s finest writers

Mr Hahn, whose father is Jewish, acknowledges that not all prize-judging works this way. For some awards, there is a kind of triage process where books are read by some of the panel, and passed on to the rest only if they are deemed worthy.

He is clear, however, that this is not the way forward for the Man Booker International.

“Something which the chair of judges [Nick Barley, director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival] said in our very first meeting was that he thinks it’s important for every book to get proper attention from the judges — that every book is read properly by all of us. This is certainly the most labour-intensive way of doing it but it’s also the most rigorous and fair way.”

The six authors shortlisted for the prize have just been announced. They include two giants of Israeli literature — David Grossman and Amos Oz.

A major challenge of the judging process is how to compare books that are not in any way alike. How can one, for example, look at a moody, atmospheric novella from Venezuela and an epic fantasy novel from Norway and decide which is better?

“We’re trying to figure out what it is a book’s trying to do and then how well it does it,” explains Mr Hahn. ‘We’re trying to work out how well realised these books are on whatever terms they’re attempting to realise themselves.”

And do the five judges manage to reach a collective decision? “One of the pleasures of judging,” Mr Hahn says, “is that you come to meetings thinking you’ve figured something out, and then you realise there’s someone who is more perceptive than you or who read the book in a better mood than you happened to read the book in, and who has noticed something that you missed. If the judges spend the meetings saying: “I like it”… “Well, I don’t like it” … that might be true, but it’s not useful, and it won’t lead ever to anyone saying: “Yes, on second thoughts I think you’re probably right.”’

Mr Hahn says it is very unlikely that the shortlist will ever be the result of a unanimous decision — it will not reflect the six books that each judge would have chosen if working alone. It does, however, need to be consensual. Everyone has to reach a collective agreement, even if it does not perfectly reflect their individual position.

Because the Man Booker International Prize is for books translated into English, 50 per cent of the prize money goes to the translator. Grossman’s A Horse Walks into a Bar is translated by Jessica Cohen and Oz’s Judas by Nicholas de Lange. If either novel wins, Cohen or de Lange will receive half the prize money. Is this fair? Hahn was himself shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 for his translation of José Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion.

He says: “What we know is that if a book is a fantastic piece of writing in English, then at least two people must have done a brilliant job to make that happen. One of the reasons the Man Booker Prize decided to split it in this way is not just because the translator did the work, but also that symbolically it’s important that the translator is recognised as a co-creator.”

As far as Israeli fiction is concerned, unless we are Hebrew speakers, we are only able to access a tiny percentage of the work published each year, because so little of it is ever translated into English.

“We have traditionally been very good cultural exporters and very bad cultural importers,” says Mr Hahn. He adds that a small silver lining to this situation is that the Israeli books that do end up in English tend to be of very high quality, because publishers are so selective in what they choose to translate.

Even though only a tiny percentage of novels from round the world is ever translated into English, the 126 books submitted for the Man Booker International Prize came from an impressively diverse spread of countries: “We had 33 languages which is great,” Mr Hahn says. ‘It was really exciting to be able to read that widely.”