Marieke Lucas Rijneveld named 'world's youngest ever author' to win International Booker for The Discomfort of Evening

The 29-year-old Dutch author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has become the youngest author ever to win the International Booker prize, taking the award for their “visceral and virtuosic” debut novel, The Discomfort of Evening, The Guardian reports.

Rijneveld, whose preferred pronouns are they/them, beat titles including Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police and Shokoofeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree to win the £50,000 award for the best fiction translated into English, which will be split equally with their translator, Michele Hutchison. At 29, Rijneveld is the youngest winner of the International Booker, and narrowly older than the youngest Booker winner, Eleanor Catton, who was 28 when she won the 2013 prize for The Luminaries.

A bestseller in the Netherlands, The Discomfort of Evening follows Jas, a girl in a devout Christian farming family, whose brother dies in an accident after she wishes he would die instead of her rabbit. Lost in grief, her family falls apart as she becomes involved in increasingly dangerous fantasies.

Like Jas, Rijneveld grew up in a strict religious community in a rural area of the Netherlands; like Jas, their 10-year-old brother died when they were three. Already an award-winning author in the Netherlands, Rijneveld continues to work on a dairy farm, although not that of their parents. “Farming keeps me grounded. The cows are my best friends; I like cleaning out the stables and shovelling the shit,” they said in an interview earlier this year.