'Ninth Building,' Translated by Professor Jeremy Tiang, Longlisted for the International Booker Prize

Ninth Building, a book by the highly regarded Chinese writer Zou Jingzhi and translated by Adjunct Associate Professor Jeremy Tiang, will be released next week from Open Letter. The work has been longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. 

The International Booker is awarded to the best work of international fiction translated into English, selected from entries published in the UK or Ireland. The books, authors and translators the prize celebrates offer readers a window onto the world and the opportunity to experience the lives of people from different cultures. The winners receive £50,000; half to the author and half to the translator. Each of the shortlisted titles receive £5,000, split evenly between the author and the translator. 

This year, the panel of judges is chaired by the prize-winning novelist Leïla Slimani. The panel also includes Uilleam Blacker, Tan Twan Eng, Parul Sehgal, and Frederick Studemann. 

“[This longlist] celebrates the variety and diversity of literary production today, the different ways in which the novel can be viewed,” said Slimani. “We wanted to give the reader the chance to discover this and to find something that will move or disturb them. The list is also a celebration of the power of language and of authors who wanted to push formal enquiry as far as possible. We wanted to celebrate literary ambition, panache, originality and of course, through this, the talent of translators who have been able to convey all of this with great skill.”

This panel of judges described Ninth Building as “a kaleidoscopic and understated collection of interlocking tales of life in an apartment building under the Cultural Revolution—the daily tedium of its inhabitants, lit by brief and tenuous moments of shared humanity.” This excerpt, published by the Booker website, reveals the clarity and style of Tiang’s translation and offers a glimpse into the formal elements of the book. 

Tiang, in an interview for the Booker website, delved into the origins of his interest in translation. “I’m a writer who grew up bilingual, and I have no other marketable skills—I think this was always where I was going to end up,” he said. “I think everyone should translate, whether or not they end up doing it as a career—it is a wonderful experience…The world is vast, and it would be such a pity if we only ever read fiction in the few languages we understand. Translated fiction is vital to encountering writing we would otherwise never know.”

The six books that have made the shortlist will be announced on Tuesday, April 18, and the winning title will be announced at a ceremony at the Sky Garden in London on May 23, 2023.

Ninth Building is available for preorder here. 

Jeremy Tiang (he/ they) is a novelist, playwright and literary translator. They have translated over twenty books from across the Chinese-speaking world, including novels by Yeng Pway Ngon, Yan Ge, Lo Yi-Chin, Shuang Xuetao and Zhang Yueran. Their plays include Salesman之死 and A Dream of Red Pavilions, and translations of plays by Chen Si’an and Wei Yu-Chia. Their novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018, and their short story collection It Never Rains on National Day was shortlisted for the same prize. In 2022, Tiang was the Princeton University Translator-in-Residence, an International Booker Prize judge, and the co-editor with Dr. Kavita Bhanot of the decolonial translation anthology Violent Phenomena. Originally from Singapore, they live in Flushing, Queens.