LONDON — The International Booker Prize has its first French winner. David Diop’s “At Night All Blood Is Black”, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, won the 2021 award on Wednesday night — a hallucinatory short novel about a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in the trenches of the First World War.
Diop, born in Paris and raised in Senegal, is a professor of 18th-century literature. His novel follows Alfa Ndiaye, one of the colonial troops France deployed on the Western Front, whose mind unravels after the death of his childhood friend. The judges called it a work of extraordinary power.
The prize, worth £50,000 and split equally between author and translator, honours fiction translated into English — a corner of the market long marginal in Britain but growing fast. Sales of translated fiction have risen steadily, and the award has become its biggest amplifier.
Diop’s win also crowns a remarkable year for a book published in French in 2018 to modest expectations, which went on to win prizes across Europe before its English translation caught fire. It is the first win for a French-language book in the prize’s history.
The shortlist this year ranged from Russian science fiction to Chilean family saga. That the trophy went to a novel about the soldiers Europe forgot — the tirailleurs sénégalais, barely honoured for a century — gives the award a resonance beyond literature.
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