<p>LONDON &mdash; A harrowing but poetic tale of comradeship, colonialism and the horrors of war won the International Booker Prize for fiction on Wednesday.</p>
<p>“At Night All Blood is Black” by French writer David Diop beat five other finalists to take the 50,000-pound ($70,000) prize, which is open to fiction in any language that has been translated into English. The prize money will be split between the author and his translator, Anna Moschovakis.</p>
<p>The novel is narrated by Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier fighting for the then-imperial power France during World War I, and charts his descent into madness on the battlefield.</p>
<p>British author Lucy Hughes-Hallett, who chaired the judging panel, said the “hypnotically compelling” book was both “appalling” and poetic, “entering the reader’s consciousness at a level that bypasses rationality and transcends the subject matter.”</p>
<p>“You have to read this book and you will come away from it changed,” she said.</p>
<p>Diop’s novel was chosen by majority decision of the five judges over contenders including Jewish-Russian family history “In Memory of Memory” by Russian writer Maria Stepanova and imaginative short-story collection “The Dangers of Smoking in Bed” by Argentina’s Mariana Enriquez. </p>
<p>Born in France and raised in Senegal, Diop teaches 18th-century literature at the University of Pau in southern France. </p>
<p>He is the first French author to win the prize, a counterpart to the prestigious Booker Prize for English-language fiction.</p>
<p>Diop’s novel, which was published in French in 2018, resonates with present-day debates about racism and colonialism.</p>
<p>Hughes-Hallett said the book didn’t win “because if speaks to the current conversation about racial politics,” but because “it spoke to us with the most power.”</p>