White Nights was published last year by MTO Press in the UK, in a translation by Kate Webster.
According to the Booker Prizes website, White Nights is a series of 13 interconnected stories "concerning the various tragedies and misfortunes that befall a group of people who all grew up and live(d) in the same village in the Beskid Niski region, in southern Poland."
Each story "centres itself around a different character and how it is that they manage to cope, survive or merely exist, despite, and often in ignorance of, the poverty, disappointment, tragedy, despair, brutality and general sense of futility that surrounds them."
The website describes the book as “a highly artistic study of death encapsulated in moving stories set in Poland's Beskid Mountains region.”
Urszula Honek, 37, has three volumes of poetry to her name. White Nights is her fiction debut.
The International Booker Prize recognises both the authors and translators, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the author and the translator.
The selection of the 13 books on the longlist was made from 149 books published between May 1, 2023 and April 30, 2024.
A shortlist of six books will be announced on April 9, and the winning title will be unveiled at a ceremony on May 21.
In 2018, the International Booker Prize went to Polish Nobel-Prize winning author Olga Tokarczuk for her novel Flights in a translation by Jennifer Croft.
(mk/gs)