Translated by US-based painter and translator Daisy Rockwell (left), "Tomb of Sand" tells the story of an 80-year-old living in northern India who decides to travel to Pakistan and revisit the ghosts of the trauma following India and Pakistan's partition in 1947. The roughly €59,000 ($63,000) prize money will be split between New Delhi-based Shree and Rockwell, who lives in Vermont.

Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk previously won the Man International Booker Prize in 2018 for her novel "Flights." This year, "The Books of Jacob" has been chosen by the jury and tells the story of Jacob Frank, a Jew who travels through Europe during the Age of Enlightenment, converting to Islam and Catholicism, and who is at times derided as a charlatan but also revered as a Messiah.

Japanese author Mieko Kawakami’s book tells the story of a 14-year-old boy who faces bullying but is resigned to his fate. Translated by Sam Bett, the book is a "haunting novel of violence that can stalk our teenage years."

Argentinian Claudia Pineiro's book has been translated by Frances Riddle and tells the story of a murder victim whose mother undertakes the search for her daughter's killer after officials close the case. Booker organizers say the novel "unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden facets of authoritarianism and hypocrisy in our society."

The only man on the short list, Fosse explores "the human condition and a radically 'other' reading experience — incantatory, hypnotic and utterly unique," the Booker website says. The series tells the story of Asle, an aging painter who lives on the coast of Norway and his doppelganger. The books have been translated by Damion Searls.

The Korean author has been writing novels and short stories for some time, and "Cursed Bunny," also a collection of short stories, defies genres and mainstream ideas of storytelling. "These are stories about survival that reveal the evils of survival at the expense of another person and often lead to vicious consequences," a user wrote on the readers platform Goodreads.

Arundhati Roy took the literary world by storm in 1997 with her story of fraternal twins Rahel and Estha coming of age amid political turbulence in Kerala in Southern India. Against the backdrop of their struggling blind grandmother's factory, the story set in the late 1960s dwells on India's entrenched caste society, its religious diversity and complex social hierarchies.

Michael Ondaatje’s celebrated 1992 Booker-winning novel explores four lives that intersect in an Italian villa as World War II draws to an end and bombs fall on Hiroshima. An exhausted nurse, a maimed thief and a wary military engineer are haunted by the English patient upstairs, who is burned beyond recognition. The novel was adapted into a 1996 film that won nine Oscars.

The Canadian author might be best known for "The Handmaid's Tale" (1985), but "The Blind Assassin" won her the Booker prize in 2000. "A multilayered drama that weaves its narrative threads across past and present, fiction and reality," said the jury of this iconic story about an aging woman who reflects on her sister's mysterious early death and the resulting scandal.

The sequel to Hilary Mantel's Tudor England historical novel "Wolf Hall" (also a Booker winner, making her the first woman and British author to win twice), "Bring Up the Bodies" sees Anne Boleyn, for whom Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church, fail to bear a son to secure the Tudor line. The king’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, must now find a solution to secure his own future.

Set in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, the Australian author's historical novel was a brutal depiction of the infamous Thailand-Burma Death Railway during World War II. It centers on an Australian surgeon in the camp who remains haunted by his affair with his uncle's young wife as he struggles to save men from starvation, cholera and torture.

American short story writer George Saunders' first full-length novel, "Lincoln in the Bardo," was an experimental work that was praised by the judging chair for "its innovation ... the way in which it paradoxically brought to life these almost-dead souls." It sees President Abraham Lincoln visit the body of his 11-year-old son, whose soul still lives on, in a Washington cemetery in 1862.

"With vivid originality, irrepressible wit and sly wisdom, Bernardine Evaristo presents a gloriously new kind of history for this old country," wrote the Booker Prize jury of the first Black writer to win the prize (shared with Margaret Atwood for "The Testaments"). The novel traces the lives of 12 mostly women and Black people coming of age in the UK across diverse generations and social classes.

It took 10 years to write and was rejected 32 times before it was finally published. Yet the 2020 Booker Prize jury needed just an hour to pick Douglas Stuart's "Shuggie Bain" as the winner from six shortlisted works. "I am absolutely stunned," said Stuart. The debut novel draws on his own life growing up gay in impoverished Glasgow in the 1980s while struggling with his mother's alcoholism.

It was third time lucky for South African author Damon Galgut. Shortlisted in 2003 and 2010, he won in 2021 for "The Promise," beating out one other previously shortlisted author, Richard Powers. The novel tells the story of a white South African farming family across four decades and the failure to fulfill the matriarch's dying wish — to gift a house on the property to a Black woman worker.