Everything you need to know about the International Booker Prize 2026 shortlist

The shortlist features two debut novels (The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran; She Who Remains), and one book published in its original language 30 years ago (The Witch). It features two author/translator pairings who have been nominated for the International Booker Prize previously: Daniel Kehlmann and Ross Benjamin were shortlisted in 2020, while Marie NDiaye and Jordan Stump were longlisted in 2016. Translator Ruth Martin was longlisted in 2020. 

The list is made up of authors and translators representing eight countries (Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Germany, Taiwan, the UK and the United States) and four continents: Asia, Europe, North America and South America. Five of the six authors and four of the six translators are women.  

The books were originally published in five languages: Bulgarian (She Who Remains), French (The Witch), German (The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran; The Director), Taiwanese Mandarin (Taiwan Travelogue) and Portuguese (On Earth As It Is Beneath). 

Shida Bazyar studied writing in northern Germany, and worked in youth education for many years. The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran has won several prizes and has been translated into a number of languages.  

Ruth Martin has been translating fiction and non-fiction books since 2010, has taught translation at the University of Kent, and is a former co-chair of the Society of Authors Translators Association.  

Rene Karabash (born Irena Ivanova) is a Bulgarian poet, writer, screenwriter and playwright, as well as the winner of several acting awards. A film of She Who Remains, adapted by the author, is set to be released in 2026. 

Izidora Angel is a Bulgarian-born writer and literary translator based in Chicago, and is currently working on a debut memoir. 

Munich-born author and playwright Daniel Kehlmann is the author of 14 novels and has won numerous literary awards. His novel Die Vermessung der Welt  is the best-selling German-language book of the past 40 years. 

Ross Benjamin is an award-winning American translator of German-language literature, and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow. His recent translations include The Diaries of Franz Kafka. 

Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia has published seven novels and has won multiple awards. As a scriptwriter she has worked on a wide range of projects for television, cinema and theatre.  

Padma Viswanathan is a Canadian-American writer and translator, whose novels have been published in eight countries. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville. 

French playwright and novelist Marie NDiaye published her first novel at 17 and went on to win the Prix Goncourt in 2009, becoming the first Black woman to win France’s most prestigious literary award.  

Jordan Stump has published over 30 translations of novels by mostly contemporary French and Francophone writers, and is Professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ is a Taiwanese writer of fiction, essays, manga and video game scripts, and literary criticism. The English-language translation of Taiwan Travelogue is already a prize winner, having won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024.  

Lin King is a writer and translator based in Taipei and New York, whose fiction has appeared in multiple publications. Her debut novel, Weeb, is coming soon. 

The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran: 

‘In Ruth Martin’s lilting translation of the German novel, Bazyar’s lyrical sentences exude a deep sensitivity to the “permanent pain” of the relentless yearning for home… A quietly beautiful exploration of the trauma of losing one’s homeland to a savage regime, the novel is testament to how hope and the revolutionary spirit endure in the face of crushing tyranny, how courage cannot be fully stamped out.’ – Rhoda Kwan, The Saturday Paper 

She Who Remains: 
 
‘There’s something folkloric, even fable-like, to the events in She Who Remains, something more mythic than realistic. As the novel goes on, tragedy is piled upon tragedy; lives are ruined by bitterness, hatred and the wreaking of revenge. Maybe that makes it inevitable that sometimes the characters themselves feel like archetypes more than individuals, and the plot teeters on the edge of melodrama; but even if so, the power of the language and the vivid portrayal of these wild, remote and “hallowed lands of the Kanun” prove incredibly hard to shake.’ – Lucy Scholes, The Telegraph 

The Director: 

‘One feels an aching sympathy for Pabst, caught in a situation so far beyond his control that “when he tried to breathe in, there was only icy water, and in the distance, he knew, monsters were moving … black and many-armed, at home in the darkness”. The Director has all the shapeshifting ambiguity and glittering unease of a modern Grimms’ fairytale: it is Kehlmann’s best work yet.’ – Nina Allen, Guardian  

On Earth As It Is Beneath:  

‘It is inventive and unflinching. And while the atmosphere is heavy with brutality and murder, Maia’s prose offers the perfect counterbalance — it is beautiful and gripping. Here, a morning isn’t just bright, it shines “with an impenetrable whiteness that dissolved the boundaries between heaven and earth.” That balance makes this a standout. On Earth As It Is Beneath is a must read for those who like their poetry written in blood.’ – Gabino Iglesias, New York Times 

The Witch: 

‘Family alienation meets suburban witchcraft in this short, fantastical work from one of France’s greatest living novelists, which is finally getting an English translation nearly 30 years after it appeared in France. Lucie, a middling witch, is instructing her two daughters in the family’s matrilineal talent of seeing the future — visions produce tears of blood — but their professionally disempowered father all but approves. As the bitter marriage at the center of the family unravels, the girls embrace their new gift more fully than Lucie could have imagined. This is NDiaye at her disquieting best.’ – Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture

Taiwan Travelogue: 

‘A good book can briefly steal your soul, replacing it with its own. But some books make you fight for that privilege; Taiwan Travelogue is one. Translated from Mandarin by Lin King, the novel about love, colonialism, war, and food… is intentionally constructed to make its soul difficult to locate. The book is framed as a new Mandarin translation of an autobiographical 1954 Japanese novel by the author Aoyama Chizuko, which was itself based on her earlier collection of travel columns. All these layers of commentary serve to make the story’s emotional center more difficult to access, and more fulfilling once you’ve earned it.’ – Talya Zax, The Atlantic 

Ana Paula Maia, author of On Earth As It Is Beneath:

‘I wanted to talk about the prison system. Not to judge it, but to try and get a deeper understanding of it. It took me about seven months to write this book. I did a lot of research reading newspapers articles, public statements, and so forth, but more than anything else, I spent a lot of time reflecting about it all.     

‘The more I reflected on the prison system in Brazil and other parts of the world, the more I realised that beyond the application of laws to criminals, in the end, we are all imprisoned in this world, with walls that may or may not be visible.’    

Padma Viswanathan, translator of On Earth As It Is Beneath: 

‘I wanted to capture the book’s blocky, roughhewn language, tenderness toward the prisoners and occasional elevation into lyricism or vaguely biblical tones. Repetition is key, with the original sin of slavery echoing as a curse down the ages. The vocabulary is straitened and incantatory, a constant reminder of the men’s confinement and the way the penal colony bears the past’s unreconciled atrocities into the present – cycles of haunting that tighten until they throttle whoever is left.’  

Marie NDiaye, author of The Witch:

‘When I wrote this book, people rarely talked about “witches”: that idea was nothing more than a vague memory of the fairy tales that might have been read to us when we were children. I wanted to make my character a contemporary witch: not very confident in her gift, even a little ashamed of it, and not particularly successful in passing it down to her daughters, who, modern teenagers that they are, don’t believe in it. In a way, it’s the story of a poor witch who struggles with that power she never asked for, who has to come to terms with the life fate has given her.   

‘I wrote this book over about two years, [when] my three children were very small. Their presence was a great inspiration for the description of the average-family sort of life you find in the book. I was living that kind of life myself.’     

Jordan Stump, translator of The Witch:

‘Sometimes I come across a book so moving to me that simply reading it doesn’t seem enough; those are the books I translate. In the case of The Witch, it was Lucie’s patient voice, her quiet exasperation faced with minor annoyances and devastating losses; also, more broadly, the novel’s casual mix of the banal and the magical, the gently comic and the understatedly tragic.  

‘Getting the voice right is always paramount in translation, particularly with NDiaye, whose voice is wonderfully hard to pin down even as it is very adamantly itself. Eventually, after more revisions than I can count, I read through a draft and find a voice emerging that’s not mine, nor exactly NDiaye’s, but that sounds like the voice of this novel. That’s a most exhilarating feeling.’    

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, author of Taiwan Travelogue:

‘Both Korea and Taiwan were once colonies of the Japanese Empire, but Koreans seem to feel uniformly resentful of that history, whereas Taiwanese people regard it with a much more conflicted mix of distaste and nostalgia. Using a contemporary Taiwanese lens, I wanted to untangle the complex circumstances that Taiwan’s people faced in the past, and to explore what kind of future we ought to strive toward.  

‘Research for the novel’s central themes of travel and food changed my life in two obvious ways: my savings went down; my weight went up.’  

Lin King, translator of Taiwan Travelogue:

‘I personally dislike historical fiction that is strictly miserable. These stories ring to me as untrue, because no matter how difficult times are, I believe that humans always manage to find flickers of levity and deep wells of love. Were Taiwan’s peoples oppressed and mistreated under Japanese rule? Yes, but that does not mean their identities and personalities were bulldozed over by their suffering. There was still humour, good food, movies, school, petty fights, and romance. To suggest otherwise is to reduce a culture to its trauma. That’s what I appreciate about Taiwan Travelogue.’