There is something quietly revolutionary about the International Booker Prize. While most literary awards celebrate the solitary genius of the author, this prize insists on a simple truth: that literature crossing borders requires two creators—the one who writes and the one who translates. When the 2026 longlist was announced on February 24th, it marked the tenth anniversary of this unique award that splits its £50,000 prize money equally between author and translator. This year's selection of thirteen books, drawn from 128 submissions across 34 languages, feels like a map of our troubled times—charting war and exile, colonial violence and feminist resistance, memory and forgetting.
The judging panel, chaired by author Natasha Brown and including mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, translator Sophie Hughes, writer Troy Onyango, and novelist Nilanjana S. Roy, has assembled a list that spans four decades of publication history and four continents of storytelling. What unites these disparate works is their preoccupation with power—who holds it, who suffers under it, and how ordinary people navigate systems designed to crush them.
The Longlist: Thirteen Portals Into Other Worlds
Taiwan Travelogue
by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King
Set in 1930s colonial Taiwan, this novel follows a Japanese author with what the judges describe as a "monstrous appetite" who develops complicated feelings for her local interpreter during a government-sponsored tour. The judges praise it as "an incredible double act"—simultaneously a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial critique. The power imbalance between colonizer and colonized becomes charged with erotic tension, while sumptuous food writing and metafictional twists keep the narrative unpredictable.
The Wax Child
by Olga Ravn, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken
Ravn, previously celebrated for "The Employees," returns with a haunting novel set during 17th-century Denmark's witch trials. The story unfolds largely from the perspective of a wax doll belonging to a group of women who use magic as survival. Aitken's translation captures what the judges call "shadowy lives revealed in shadowy prose"—every word feels spontaneous, every scene alive with mystery. It is historical fiction that casts a spell, refusing to be "biddable" or predictable.
Women Without Men
by Shahrnush Parsipur, translated from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh
This is a book that has traveled through fire to reach us. Banned in Iran for over three decades, written by an author who was imprisoned for daring to write about women's desires, Parsipur's novel follows five women who find refuge in a garden on the outskirts of Tehran against the backdrop of revolution and coups. The women shed their old lives "like snakeskin," creating a space that is simultaneously scoured by reality and touched with fable. That it finds publication in English now, decades after its original release, feels like an act of literary justice.
The Witch
by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump
In this unsettling domestic gothic, a long-suffering housewife named Lucie inducts her daughters into a secret family practice: witchcraft. When Lucie's husband disappears, the balance of their stifling suburban life shifts. Stump's translation renders NDiaye's exquisite prose, where "sentences twist and transform in unexpected ways." Through the daughters' nonchalant acceptance of their emerging powers, the novel brings "the nuances of motherhood into sharp focus."
The Duke
by Matteo Melchiorre, translated from Italian by Antonella Lettieri
A debut novel that reads like a classic, "The Duke" traces a feud between two men in an Italian village in the Dolomites. The escalation is electric, the minor characters wonderfully evocative, and the village itself becomes a character—claustrophobic, ancient, inescapable. Lettieri's translation preserves the storytelling momentum of what the judges call "storytelling at its best."
On Earth As It Is Beneath
by Ana Paula Maia, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan
Set in a remote Brazilian penal colony built on land where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered, this is perhaps the darkest book on the list. As the colony nears its end, the warden introduces a ritualized full-moon hunt, releasing prisoners into the forest for sport. The judges describe it as "a stark, unsettling exploration of power, violence, destruction and institutional corruption" rendered in "spare yet masterful prose." The closed world of the prison becomes a microcosm of societal brutality.
The Director
by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin
Kehlmann performs a "literary panning shot" over the career of real-life filmmaker G.W. Pabst, exploring how Nazi ideology leaked into the arts during Europe's occupation. Where is the line between survival and collaboration? Can art survive the moral bankruptcy of its makers? Benjamin's translation juggles multiple voices with what shouldn't look like ease but does—"wit and gravity" in equal measure.
She Who Remains
by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel
Another debut, this novel is set in an Albanian village governed by archaic laws. A teenage girl swears a vow of chastity to escape an arranged marriage, becoming a "sworn virgin" with a new name—Matija—free to live as a man. But freedom comes at a cost that tears her family apart. Angel's translation captures "the slippery uncertainty of painful memories" in what the judges call "an unforgettable modern fairy tale."
Small Comfort
by Ia Genberg, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson
Five interconnected stories explore how money makes the world go round: a separated couple pretends to be married to secure an inheritance; a researcher uses Monopoly to study inequality and discovers how love corrupts. Josefsson's translation is "staggeringly flexible," with natural dialogue and rhythmic prose that "zings and smarts." It is, the judges note, "breathtakingly original, profound but with a delicious dose of irreverence."
The Deserters
by Mathias Énard, translated from French by Charlotte Mandell
Énard weaves together two contrasting narratives: one, raw and unforgiving, follows a man and woman escaping an undefined war; the other, more refined, looks backward at a scientific conference celebrating Paul Heudeber, a mathematician, communist and poet. The engagement with history spans from World War II to 9/11, from the Cold War to Ukraine and former Yugoslavia. The mathematicians on the judging panel particularly appreciated the convincing portrayal of mathematical culture.
The Remembered Soldier
by Anjet Daanje, translated from Dutch by David McKay
After World War I, a soldier named Noon Merckem is found wandering in a Belgian field, amnesiac and adrift. Claimed by a wife he cannot remember, he struggles to return to an elusive past. McKay's "intuitive translation" traces the ravages of shellshock while asking how far humans will go to love, how fiercely they will fight "for what they intend to have and to hold."
We Are Green and Trembling
by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers
A fiercely imaginative reworking of colonial history giving voice to Antonio de Erauso, a 17th-century queer Argentinian conquistador who writes from the South American jungle after fleeing imperial authority. While caring for two Indigenous girls he has freed from enslavement, Antonio becomes witness to and participant in the brutal machinery of conquest. Myers's translation renders "luminous, wild, lyrical and inventive language" that is at once playful and devastating.
The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran
by Shida Bazyar, translated from German by Ruth Martin
A debut that follows an Iranian family through four decades of cycles—flight and return, exile and assimilation. Two young revolutionaries, Behzad and Nahid, flee to West Germany with their children. One generation yearns for homeland; the other makes new beginnings. Martin's translation captures what it means to "always live in hope," with pages that "pulse with solidarities and betrayal, with heartache and humour."
The Translator as Bridge: Padma Viswanathan and the Art of Carrying Voices Across
Among the thirteen translators on this longlist, one name carries a particular resonance for Indian readers: Padma Viswanathan. The Canadian-American writer and translator of Indian origin has been recognized for her English translation of Ana Paula Maia's "On Earth As It Is Beneath"—a novel that could not be further from the world of Viswanathan's own fiction, yet shares with it a deep concern for the scars of history.
About Padma Viswanathan
Viswanathan is a novelist of considerable reputation, author of three novels including the internationally bestselling The Toss of a Lemon (2008), which was inspired by her own family history and follows three generations of a Brahmin family through sixty years of social and political change in South India. That book became a national bestseller in India and was shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Fiction Prize and Canada's Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her second novel, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, was a Giller Prize finalist, while her most recent work, The Charterhouse of Padma (2024), explores the lives of two South Asian professors. Her memoir, Like Every Form of Love, was published in 2023.
What makes Viswanathan's longlisting particularly noteworthy is that it recognizes her work as a bridge-builder between literary traditions. Before tackling Ana Paula Maia's brutal prison narrative, she translated São Bernardo by Brazilian literary giant Graciliano Ramos, published by New York Review Books in 2020. The Los Angeles Review of Books praised her for making "a precious contribution to the body of English-language literature, adding to it the vibrant voice of one [of] the most important figures of 20th-century Brazilian letters." She is currently co-editing, with renowned translator Daniel Hahn, the forthcoming Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories.
This is a career that spans continents in both life and art. Born to a family with roots in India, Viswanathan has lived in Canada and now divides her time between Fayetteville, Arkansas—where she is professor of creative writing at the University of Arkansas—and Montreal. She is also the founding director of the Arkansas International Writer-at-Risk Residency Programme, which supports writers fleeing persecution. Her work embodies the International Booker Prize's ethos: that literature is not bound by borders, and that those who carry stories across linguistic boundaries are creators in their own right.
"A stark, unsettling exploration of power, violence, destruction and institutional corruption" rendered in "spare yet masterful prose."
— The Judges on On Earth As It Is Beneath
The book she has translated, "On Earth As It Is Beneath," is a challenging work. Set in a remote penal colony in Brazil built on land scarred by slavery and colonialism, it depicts a world where "punishment has replaced justice and cruelty has become the norm." The novel's spare, masterful prose renders what the judges call "a closed world thick with dread, brutality and moral decay." The ritualized hunt—where prisoners are released into the forest for sport—serves as a metaphor for institutionalized violence that transcends its specific setting.
Viswanathan's task was to carry Maia's Portuguese into English without losing the texture of that dread, the weight of that history. The result is a translation that allows English readers to feel the full force of a Brazilian reality that is simultaneously specific and universal—a meditation on how systems of power corrupt absolutely, how cruelty becomes normalized, how the land itself remembers the violence done upon it.
For Indian readers, Viswanathan's success offers a particular satisfaction. Here is a writer who has drawn deeply from Indian wells—her debut novel rooted in South Indian Brahmin family history, her recent work exploring South Asian academic life—now being recognized on the world stage for her service to Brazilian literature. It suggests that the Indian diaspora is not merely a recipient of global culture but a contributor to it, a mediator between worlds. In an era of rising cultural nationalism, Viswanathan's career demonstrates the possibilities of cosmopolitan engagement—not the shallow cosmopolitanism of the global elite, but the deep, rooted kind that grows from having multiple homes, multiple languages, multiple histories in one's blood.
The International Booker Prize has always recognized this kind of literary citizenship. Past winners have come from Korea, Poland, the Netherlands, Oman, Argentina, France, India, Brazil, Bulgaria, Germany, and Sweden—each win a reminder that great literature speaks across difference. Viswanathan's presence on the 2026 longlist continues this tradition, honoring not just a book but the labor of connection itself.
The shortlist will be announced on March 31st, with the winner revealed at Tate Modern on May 19th. Whether or not "On Earth As It Is Beneath" advances further, Viswanathan's recognition is already a victory—for translators, for diasporic writers, for the stubborn belief that literature can build bridges across the chasms of language and history. In a world increasingly defined by walls, the International Booker Prize reminds us that there are still people committed to climbing over them, carrying stories in their hands.
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