German-language literature is becoming global

This year there is an even greater chance that a German-language novel will win the International Booker Prize: With Daniel Kehlmann’s “Lichtspiel”, (in English “The Director”) and Shidar Bayzar’s “Nachts ist es Huhn in Tehran” (in English “The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran”), the jury has nominated two novels from Germany for its shortlist consisting of six works.

Kehlmann was celebrated in the USA

The nomination for Kehlmann’s novel about the life, films and Nazi involvement of film director GW Pabst, published here in 2023, is hardly a surprise: “The Director” was already widely praised in the Anglo-American literary world after its publication, including the novel being one of the books of 2025 in the “New York Times Book Review”.

Things are a little different with Shida Bayzar, who was born in 1988 to Iranian parents in Hermeskeil, Rhineland-Palatinate. “It’s Quiet at Night in Tehran” is her debut novel, which was published in 2016, shortly after Bayzar finished her literary writing studies in Hildesheim, and which only came to the attention of a British publisher, Scribe, last year.

Bayzar’s novel was published in 2016

In the novel, Bayzar tells an autobiographically based Persian family story from the fall of the Shah in 1979 to 2009, decade by decade and divided into four chapters, each from the perspective of a different family member.

“It’s quiet at night in Tehran” had some notable successes in this country, including Bayzar receiving the Uwe Johnson Prize and the Ernst Toller Prize for it, and the successor “Three Comrades” made it onto the longlist for the German Book Prize in 2021 – but unlike Kehlmann or Jenny Erpenbeck, only a few people know Bayzar’s name outside of the literary world.

This can now change via the detour of the United Kingdom and the International Booker Prize, also because against the background of the events in Iran, Shida Bayzar’s novel has acquired a lot of current explosiveness and allows the conditions there and in the Iranian diaspora to be better understood. As she wrote a few days ago in a text for “Zeit online”: “Those who talk about Iran don’t even need their own ideas, I think. Iran’s reality is so cynical and cruel that it writes its metaphors all by itself.”

Marie N’Diaye is also nominated

But the competition is of course top-class: The French author Marie N’Diaye with her novel “The Witch”, which was originally published in 1996 (“La Sorcière”, published in German by Antje Kunstmann Verlag) and tells the story of a housewife in the French provinces; the Bulgarian author Rene Karabash with “She Who Remains”, originally published in 2019, a “dark and poetic novel about identity, gender, love, freedom and social norms” set in the Albanian mountains, according to the jury.

And then there is the Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia with “On Earth As It Is Beneath” (Maia has so far only had one novel in German, “War of the Bastards”, published by A1 Verlag), which tells of a group of men who were imprisoned for years and each of them is now on the run on their own, and finally the Taiwanese author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ with her novel “Taiwan Travelogue”.

Whether Kehlmann is the only author on this shortlist or even Shida Bayzar will be announced at an event at the Tate Modern in London on May 19th. The prize is endowed with 50,000 pounds and is divided equally between the author and the translator.

One should not confuse the International Booker Prize, which the Indian author Banu Mushtaq won last year with her short story collection “Heart Lamp”, with the similarly renowned Booker Prize, which is always awarded in November for the best English-language novel from the Anglo-American region.