The 2026 judging panel for the International Booker Prize, the world’s most influential award for translated fiction, is announced today (Tuesday, 24 June 2025), as submissions open to UK and Irish publishers.  

Critically-acclaimed author Natasha Brown, one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, is joined on the judging panel by: writer, broadcaster and Oxford University Professor of Mathematics and for the Public Understanding of Science Marcus du Sautoy; International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator Sophie Hughes; writer, Lolwe editor and bookshop owner Troy Onyango; and award-winning novelist and columnist Nilanjana S. Roy. 

This year’s judges are looking for the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 May 2025 and 30 April 2026. 

In 2026, the Booker Prize Foundation will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the prize in its current form – the first winner in 2016 was The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith. Han went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024. 

The International Booker Prize recognises the vital work of translation, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the winning author and translator/s. Each shortlisted title is awarded a prize of £5,000: £2,500 for the author and £2,500 for the translator/s. In championing works from around the world that have originated in a wide range of languages, the prize fosters an engaged global community of writers and readers whose experiences and interests transcend national borders.  

A longlist of 12 or 13 books will be announced on Tuesday, 24 February 2026, with a shortlist of six books to follow on Tuesday, 31 March 2026. The winning book will be announced at a ceremony in May 2026, which will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes social media channels.  

‘Fiction in translation allows us to reach past borders and language barriers to encounter new stories, experiences and ideas. Over the years, the International Booker Prize’s shortlists, longlists and winners have amounted to an impressively varied (and consistently impressive) collection of literature. As a reader, this prize has broadened my literary horizons and introduced me to some of my all-time favourite books – so it’s an enormous honour and privilege to chair this year’s judging panel. 

‘During our first meeting, one of my fellow judges described the coming months of reading together as a quest. I think that’s a perfect description. We’re about to embark on an epic journey across the world’s fiction, travelling paths forged by the magic of translation. I can’t wait to share the treasures we discover with readers.’ 

‘As we head into the 10th anniversary year for the International Booker Prize in its current form, we have an exceptionally well-read, well-travelled, thoughtful and attentive panel of judges, who bring a thrilling range of expertise on literature and creativity to the task of selecting the best translated fiction of the year.   

‘In Natasha Brown, who has been fêted as a literary star of our times, the panel has a Chair who brings experience from both sides of the literary prize process – as a previous judge and as an award-recipient. And with a decade in the financial industry under her belt she will bring a mathematician’s order as she leads a highly-esteemed panel of judges with an internationalist outlook, including a professor who has written about how maths shapes creativity, an editor, writer and bookseller specialising in Pan-African literature, an award-winning novelist and Financial Times columnist from India, and the most nominated translator in International Booker Prize history, who works from Spanish and Italian. I can’t wait to see the selection of books that results from their creative chemistry and collective taste.’ 

Natasha Brown (Chair) is an English novelist. Her debut novel Assembly (2021) won a Betty Trask award in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, the Folio Prize and the Orwell Prize for political fiction. It has been translated into 17 languages. Universality (2025), her second novel, is also an Orwell Prize finalist and has been hailed as ‘an instant classic’ by Elle UK. She was a judge for the Goldsmiths Prize 2021 and the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize 2022.  

Before writing her novels, she read Mathematics at Cambridge University and spent over a decade working in the financial services industry. Brown was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2023 and one of the Observer’s Best Debut Novelists in 2021. She has been described as ‘one of the most intelligent voices writing today’ by the Guardian and as ‘a powerful new voice in British literature’ by the Sunday Times. 

Marcus du Sautoy is the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College. In 2016 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is author of nine books including his most recent, Blueprints: How Mathematics Shapes Creativity (2025). He has presented numerous radio and TV series including a four-part landmark TV series for the BBC, The Story of Maths, a three-part series, The Code, and programmes with comedians Alan Davies and Dara O’Briain. He has written and performed a play called I is a Strange Loop, which has been staged at numerous venues including the Barbican in London. His second play, The Axiom of Choice, toured India in 2024. He works extensively with a range of arts organisations, from The Royal Opera House to the Glastonbury Festival, bringing science alive for the public. His mathematical research uses classical tools from number theory to explore the mathematics of symmetry.  

In 2001 he was awarded the Berwick Prize by the London Mathematical Society and in 2009 he was awarded the Royal Society’s Faraday Prize, the UK’s premier award for excellence in communicating science. He received an OBE for services to science in the 2010 New Year’s Honours List. 
 

Sophie Hughes is a literary translator from Spanish and Italian. She is the translator of more than 20 novels by authors such as Fernanda Melchor, Alia Trabucco Zerán and Enrique Vila-Matas. She has been shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Valle Inclán Prize, and in 2021 she was awarded the Queen Sofía Translation Prize. Her translations have been longlisted for the International Booker Prize five times, and shortlisted three times making her the most nominated translator in the prize’s ten-year history. Her most recent shortlisting was for her translation of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection in 2025. 

Her translations and writing have been published in McSweeney’s, the Guardian, the Paris Review, the White Review, Frieze and the New York Times. Hughes has also worked with the Stephen Spender Trust promoting translation in schools and is the co-editor of the anthology Europa28: Writing by Women on the Future of Europe, published in 2020 in collaboration with Hay Festival. She lives in Trieste, Italy.  
 
Troy Onyango is a London-based writer and editor from Kisumu, Kenya, and the founder of Lolwe, a Pan-African literary and arts magazine. He is also the owner of Lolwe Books, an indie Pan-African bookshop in both Kenya and the UK. His debut collection of short stories, For What Are Butterflies Without Their Wings, was published in 2022. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Doek!, Wasafiri, Nairobi Noir and Transition, among other publications. He was a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing and a nominee for the Pushcart Prize, and the winner of the inaugural Nyanza Annual Literary Festival Prize. He holds a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Nairobi, an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia (where he was a Miles Morland Scholar) and an MA in African Studies from SOAS University of London.   

Nilanjana S. Roy is a novelist and newspaper columnist. She is the author of two award-winning fantasy novels, The Wildings (2012) and The Hundred Names of Darkness (2013). Her third novel and first for adult readers, Black River(2022), is Delhi noir fiction. It was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger award and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has also written an essay collection, The Girl Who Ate Books, about her lifelong love of reading, and is the editor of three major anthologies: Our Freedoms (2021), Patriots, Poets & Prisoners: Selections from Ramananda Chatterjee’s The Modern Review (2016), and A Matter of Taste: The Penguin Book of Indian Writing on Food (2004).  
 
Over two decades as a columnist and literary critic, Roy has written for publications including the Business Standard, the New York Times, the Guardian and the BBC. She currently writes a column about books and the reading life for the Financial Times. She lives in Delhi, India. 

In 2026, it will be 10 years since the first winner of the International Booker Prize, in its current form, was announced. 

The prize began life in 2005 as the Man Booker International Prize. It was initially a biennial prize for a body of work, and there was no stipulation that the work should be written in a language other than English. The winners were Ismail Kadare, Chinua Achebe, Alice Munro, Philip Roth, Lydia Davis and László Krasznahorkai.  

In 2015, after the rules of the original Booker Prize expanded to allow writers of any nationality to enter – as long as their books were written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland – the International Prize evolved to become the mirror image of the English-language prize. Since then it has been awarded annually for a single work of fiction – either a novel or a collection of short stories – written in another language and translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.  

Along with The Vegetarian (2016), other winners have included Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft (2018), The Discomfort of Evening by Lucas Rijneveld, translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison(2020), At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated from French by Anna Moschovakis (2021), and Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from German by Michael Hofmann (2024). 

The International Booker Prize continues to build in global importance each year. The 2026 winners can expect a worldwide readership and a significant increase in profile and sales, including in the author’s home country.    

The announcement of the 2025 winner, Heart Lamp, written by Banu Mushtaq and translated by Deepa Bhasthi – the first collection of short stories to win the prize and the first translated from Kannada – was reported in over 1,826 news stories across 60 countries around the world in the week after its win and the winners’ speech had over 30 million views online. The book rapidly sold out in the UK in the subsequent days, with the UK publisher And Other Stories immediately reprinting 40,000 copies.  

According to And Other Stories, sales of the paperback have increased by 292% since it won the International Booker Prize 2025. Prior to the winner announcement in May 2025, it had sold 5,100 copies in the UK; since, it has sold over 20,000 copies. Prior to its longlisting, translation rights to Heart Lamp had been sold in eight languages, including seven Indian subcontinent languages with a further two English rights sales (in addition to the UK, US and India); that has now increased to an additional 13 languages, including five new Indian subcontinent languages. 

In the author and translators’ home country of India, 60,100 copies of the English language version of Heart Lamp, published by Random House India, have sold since March, with 49,500 of those copies since May, the month it was announced as winner of the International Booker Prize. It has held the #1 spot on Amazon India across all categories almost continuously since the announcement. The impact of the prize has also been felt with an enthusiastic response from the Indian media – with over 700 pieces of press coverage – and establishment, raising the profile of Mushtaq and Bhasthi and securing a pledge from the Karnataka state government to fund the translation of renowned Kannada literary works into English. 

The prize has helped to drive a boom in translated fiction in the UK: according to the Bookseller, sales have doubled since the International Booker Prize launched in its current form nine years ago, with ‘roughly £1 in every £8 spent through NielsenIQ BookScan’s Fiction category over the past year … on a translated title’. This is largely down to younger readers, with almost half of translated fiction in the UK bought by under-35s. The prize’s influence also extends to other awards, with four authors – Han Kang, Jon Fosse, Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk – recognised by the International Booker Prize going on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.  

Since being published on the Booker Prizes social media platforms on 22 April, the International Booker Prize 2025 shortlist films have been viewed over 37 million times. All six films can be watched here. The Booker Prize Foundation has created its series of six films featuring well-known actors for its two annual prizes since 2022. Released in spring and autumn, they have become one of the highlights of the International Booker Prize and the Booker Prize seasons, with the 2024 films for both prizes viewed online more than 83 million times.  

UK and Irish publishers are now invited to submit their books for the 2026 prize. Rules and submission guidelines are available here. Key deadlines are staggered between Thursday, 24 July 2025 and Thursday, 23 October 2025.  

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