On Wednesday the novel At Night All Blood is Black, written by David Diop and translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, was announced as the winner of the 2021 International Booker Prize. The announcement was made by the chair of judges Lucy Hughes-Hallett during a virtual ceremony hosted from Coventry Cathedral.
Diop and Moschovakis will split the £50,000 prize, which aims to afford equal recognition to authors and translators. Diop becomes the first French writer to win the International Booker, which functioned as a lifetime achievement award until 2016, when it became an annual award for a single book translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland.
In At Night All Blood is Black, Diop exhumes the unheralded experience of the Senegalese tirailleurs, colonial infantry corps who fought in the trenches for France during the First World War. Through the descent into madness of a young man called Alfa Ndiaye, who acquires a taste for blood following the death of a childhood friend, Diop reckons with the brutality of war and the colonial order.
Diop was inspired by his great-grandfather’s service as a tirailleur during the war. His novel was selected from a shortlist of six books, by a panel of five judges: the cultural historian and chair Hughes-Hallett, the journalist Aida Edemariam, the Booker Prize shortlisted novelist Neel Mukherjee, Professor of the History of Slavery at Bristol University, Olivette Otele, and the poet, translator, and biographer George Szirtes. Announcing the winner, Hughes-Hallett said:
‘This story of warfare and love and madness has a terrifying power. The protagonist is accused of sorcery, and there is something uncanny about the way the narrative works on the reader. We judges agreed that its incantatory prose and dark, brilliant vision had jangled our emotions and blown our minds. That it had cast a spell on us.’
At Night All Blood is Black is the second novel by Diop, who was born in Paris in 1966 and spent the majority of his childhood in Senegal, before receiving a doctorate from the Sorbonne and becoming a professor of 18th-century French literature at the University of Pau and the Adour Region. The acclaimed poet, author, and translator Anna Moschovakis has published the poetry collection You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, the recipient of the James Laughlin Award in 2011, while her translations from French include Bresson on Bresson and Annie Ernaux’s The Possession.
At Night All Blood is Black was published in 2018 in France, where it was nominated for ten literary awards and received the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, which allows nearly 2,000 high school students to vote for their favourite prose work from the Prix Goncourt shortlist. The French version of the novel, Frère d’âme, also won the Swiss Prix Ahmadou Korouma, while in translation the work has received the Europese Literatuurprijs in the Netherlands and the Premio Strega Europeo in Italy.
