Tell us about your reading habits away from judging the International Booker Prize. What kinds of books are you drawn to, and what’s currently on your to-be-read list – besides the many books you’re considering for the IBP?  

Max Porter: I’m usually fairly undisciplined in my reading, at any one time I’ll have a poetry book or two on the go, a political book, some work research, a novel for bedtime, unpublished manuscripts by mentees, maybe a graphic novel. But this judging process has meant I’ve dropped all that and I’m only reading translated fiction. It’s wonderful, but intense. It’s made me very self-conscious about how I read. I’m looking forward to reading slowly again, dawdling through a book. Right now the only non-Booker reading I’m doing is poetry. I’m reading Strange Beach by Oluwaseun Olayiwola, and the collected poems of Dionne Brand. Poetry feels like a quiet room to escape to after the beautiful noise of the Booker books in my head.  

Sana Goyal: In my day job, I edit a 40-year-old magazine for new international writing, so I have to be open to the world. I try to fill in the lacunae in my own reading: I try to challenge myself, I try to un-read as I read. I try to pay attention to the underdogs: to the writers who don’t win, to the writers who don’t make it to bestseller lists. I think indie and small presses world-wide have been doing the heavy weight-lifting, taking a chance on some of the most risk-taking, trailblazing work of our times.  

I’ve discovered so many writers and translators in these months. I’m looking forward to reading their backlists and following their careers for years to come. I have a soft spot for poetry – something I share with my partner – and I’m excited to return to reading poems as spring sets in. 

Anton Hur: This is a bit of a tall order, but I don’t want to read a book that does something I’ve seen done elsewhere and better. I want to be taken out of what I know. At the very least, if a work is doing something that’s been done before – nothing new under the sun and all that – I want to be invigorated by the energy with which it has been written or translated. Which is why my favourite kind of writing is poetry and literary fiction, especially translated works, because I love the spirit of experimentation and the care put into writing a magnetic sentence. As soon as I’m done with the IBP pile, I have to dive into a bunch of books about painters because I am trying to write a book about painting: notes by Agnes Martin, Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour, Chun Kyung-ja’s writing, if I can find any that’s not out of print, that sort of thing. It’s fun when writing is an excuse to just read a bunch of books. 

Beth Orton: I have gravitated to memoirs and essays in the last few years, more than fiction. Maggie Nelson’ s On Freedom and Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger are a couple that come to mind as being life-altering reading. In terms of memoir, I was deeply moved by Abi Morgan’s honesty, humility and humour, and the dignity with which she wrote This is Not a Pity Memoir. I am drawn to Rachel Cusk for her exactness and anything that Zadie Smith writes, maybe because she is such a brilliant essayist as well as novelist. All Fours by Miranda July is masterful in its raw, unschooled brilliance. I also loved Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart for its insight into lives I came to realise I knew very little of, but also for a beautiful portrait of a love between a daughter and her mother. In the couple of years leading up to being asked to be a judge for the International Booker Prize I was making a point to only read female authors and writers as an experiment. When Max Porter asked me to be on the panel, I revisited his book Grief is the Thing with Feathers and it was a beautiful gateway back to reading other sorts of fiction. Now that I’ve sharpened my fiction-reading skills I want to go back and read all the classics I’ve missed or have read but want to re-read, from the Brontës to Virginia Woolf. I’m also forever taking notes in the meetings with my fellow judges about books they are passionate about and I’m excited to dig ever deeper into translated fiction. 

What are you hoping to find in selecting books for the International Booker Prize longlist? Are there certain qualities or attributes that you’re looking for?  

Max Porter: I like when I’m reading a book and I think ‘Wow, I didn’t know I was looking for this.’ So the books are teaching us what we’re looking for. But generally I’d say I want something completely unique to the book to be happening between the writer and the translator; something only this book can do. That might be style, or plot, or some kind of indescribable musicality or spirit, but it’s amazing how instantly one feels it. Reading this many books sharpens your receptiveness, your readerly toolkit, so you become hyper-aware of how a book is working on you. Or isn’t.  

One thing that became clear after our first meeting is that the judges aren’t all looking for the same thing. We’re on different hunts. And I am extremely glad of that. It means we’re all describing different books to each other, using different critical tools and emotional criteria, and that’s very exciting.  

Sana Goyal: I don’t know that I was looking to find any one thing. Looking back, I hope that I went into, and through, the process with a sense of unknowing, and perhaps, unlearning.  

What I know was that I wanted to read books which upend our expectations and preconceived notions of what fiction – prize-winning, indeed Booker winning, fiction – can do, or be. But perhaps also books which reassure us of the unbridled pleasures of fiction. Books which show audacity and ambition, and which tactfully and seamlessly balance self-consciousness/awareness and self-erasure, tradition and risk, on the page. Books which offer a sense of refuge and rootedness, which anchor you whilst also giving you itchy feet for other worlds – linguistically, geographically – beyond your own.  

A book can very quietly, very softly leave a mark on you. A book can be bold and assertive and noisy, almost in your face. One isn’t better than the other, doesn’t hold more value than the other – a healthy and thriving literary ecosystem makes room for a multiplicity of writers’ techniques and reader’s tastes. I used to think that when you find a book that has that singular, shining quality – dare I say, that prize-winning quality – it’s going to make itself known to you, one way or the other. Now, having read 150+ books, I’m beginning to believe that the reader, too, brings something to the table — something close to faith. 

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading alongside my fellow judges, it’s a sense of openness to difference, even disobedience. We each bring our individual selves – our histories, experiences, perspectives, learnings, inevitable biases – to a book, but it’s when we diverge, or clash, or fight our corners, that the real magic, the real conversation, happens. 

Anton Hur: As a literary translator, I know many readers because I do a lot of promotional work and meet them all over the world in festivals and other book events and on various social media platforms. I find my decision-making not necessarily influenced by them, but influenced by my awareness of them – a very nice kind of awareness, much like I’m about to throw a surprise party for a friend. I have an almost sadistic urge to delight them. I want them to pick up a book from the longlist and be completely enchanted and, hopefully, transformed. Or maybe they will hate the book, but hate it in a way that interests them, if that makes sense? I know I should be thinking about my own personal reactions and whatnot, but I can’t help gleefully gauging the responses of the global readership of the International Booker Prize whenever I put down a book. 

Beth Orton: I feel that we are all coming to the longlist with a view to being as honest about the books we have individually been touched by, rather than it being strategic. I like the fact that if a book has passed one of us by it will likely be picked up by one of the other judges and brought to our attention. I know for myself that I can only be true to whether or not I have been moved. I need to fall in love or in grief with a book, so that no matter what I’m doing I am still living inside the story and the characters, like an infection or an infatuation, even when I’m not reading it. The book has to live beyond the page for me to know I’m taken. I also want to be lulled under the spell of a seamless translation. I have never really thought about what a translator brings to a book and it has been one of the most fascinating and satisfying revelations to understand the skill of a genius translator. How they whisper the meaning across the page, a second skin bringing the truest meaning to life, it’s a very poetic art form and one that I’ve grown to respect massively during the last six months. 

Tell us about your favourite work of fiction in translation.   

Max Porter: That’s very difficult. Many of my favourite books are in translation. But because it is probably my favourite novel I would say The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas, translated by Elizabeth Rokkan. The translation has always intrigued me. It was one of the books I most felt a kind of spell being cast over me where I was aware I wasn’t reading the original book. I was in a different place, caught between the Norwegian strangeness and English strangeness, a place only I could access, bespoke to my relationship with language, and that uncanny revelation fed into the atmosphere of the book and added to its already potent effects. It was one of the books that made me fall in love with translated literature.  

Sana Goyal: I’m conscious that, as judges, we’re putting books in competition with one another – choosing winners and losers – when in fact books should be in conversation. So, in an attempt not to pick favourites, I offer you a small slice, a starting point.  

Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag, translated by Srinath Perur — for making me crave crispy dosas on a winter’s day in London.  

Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry — for making me want to bite my fingernails again.  

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell — for making me afraid to turn off the lights at 3am.  

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, translated by Jonathan Wright — for giving me goosebumps over 300-odd pages.  

Where The Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko, translated by Polly Barton — for altering my understanding of ghosts — and ghost stories. 

Anton Hur: My favourite works in translation tend to be from non-Korean languages into Korean, because Korea has such a long and storied tradition of author-translators, a tradition that more English writers ought to make it a point to emulate. Trust me, it’ll help your writing a lot, and you’ll be making a real contribution into the literary world. That said, if I am to limit myself to into-English translations of fiction that are not my own, my favourite or most influential would be a text I read for the International Baccalaureate in high school, which is Stuart Gilbert’s translation of The Plague by Albert Camus. I remember this book, along with Beloved by Toni Morrison and Possession by A.S. Byatt, demonstrating to me as an impressionable high schooler what literature can do. Very large swathes of my brain are shaped like these books. 

Beth Orton: Swann’s Way [the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time] is a book I want to revisit once I go back to my life, and that it will be Lydia Davis’s translation. I have been told by reliable sources that hers is the most true to Proust’s original. With my newfound understanding of how important a true translation is, how utterly at the mercy of the translator we are, I want to experience that for myself and feel how I never find the edges of where the writer begins and the translator ends. 

International Booker Prize judges have to read well over a hundred books over the course of the prize season, and read several books multiple times. How have you approached this unique challenge?  

Max Porter: It’s been very challenging because I’ve got three children and a dog and my work life has been hectic this year. I always have a book on me. There’s a book in my car so when I drop a child at football I can read 30 pages while they warm up. I’ve got a book in the loo. I’ve got several by the bed. I rejoice in train delays. It’s the equivalent of CrossFit for readers. The association of reading with leisure means that when people see you reading they find it hard to believe it’s work. HARD WORK. I appear to be sitting in my armchair sipping coffee reading a novel, but I’M WORKING.  

I’ve found I’m kind of drunk on books. I’m completely, marvellously, saturated by these stories. It’s a weird treat. Different worlds, different ways of life, strange people whizzing about in my mind, complex emotional scenarios I’m carrying around as I go about my day. I’m chatting at the school gate about the weather, but my mind is three centuries ago, three thousand miles away in the mind of old lady whose language I don’t speak. It’s miraculous. I’m profoundly enriched by it. And also going a bit mad, which is no bad thing.  

Sana Goyal: I work at Wasafiri full-time, so, truth be told, I’ve been reading without routine and with abandon. I’ve read books at first light and under the glow of the bedside lamp, in hours of deep silence, and in busy cafes and train carriages.   

I think what’s helped me navigate the long, at-times arduous, process is the knowledge that pausing, or momentarily putting a book down, because it just doesn’t feel like the right time for the story, doesn’t mean it’s the end of my journey with it. Often books can surprise you, show you what you couldn’t previously see, if you give them another chance. 

There are good days and bad days, but it’s hard to put into words the thrill (and relief, really) of reading what you know is a potential winner –– knowing you may, someday, have the chance to champion it, publicly acknowledge the efforts of the writer and translator, and place it in the palms of potentially hundreds and thousands of readers. It’s like curating a global book club! 

Something I’ve learned from the last few months is that I can carve out the time to read a book a day, if I want to. Before the International Booker Prize judging, I didn’t think this was always possible, or even desirable — it’s easy to make excuses, or succumb to endless scrolling on social media. I feel lucky to have the chance to slow down, to live my days with a selection of these books for longer than I usually would. I also always, always begin a new book as soon as I turn the final pages on the last one — I take comfort in that sense of continuity; and call me superstitious, but I believe it’s the one trick to avoid a reading slump! Try it — it will completely change your relationship with your TBR pile. 

Anton Hur: I’ve always prided myself in being a reader first and foremost, and I was always the kid at school who won awards for most books read or most books checked out of the library and that kind of thing, and I’ve managed to make a living essentially off of reading books. The Japanese translator Sam Bett once called translation the slowest form of reading in the world, but, my god, there is something extra unnatural about Booker Prize reading. I’ve had to read the kind of books I would never subject myself to and often be reminded why I do not need to subject myself to them. There have been real discoveries as well, but at the time of this writing, it’s been the kind of long march that I haven’t experienced since my national service days. I keep reminding myself that reading is a physical endeavour and I need to take care of myself in the process, else I’ll end up with physical sickness. 

Beth Orton: If I am taken by a book, I can read quickly and am completely committed. Being a judge for the International Booker challenges you to read beyond any sort of comfort level. The responsibility overwhelms me if think too hard about it – there are real people behind these books, perhaps a life’s work in your hand. I know from my own experience as a songwriter that not a line or a word is kept, after the initial inspiration, without it having been weighed many times over, sometimes for years. I am holding something that a writer and a translator have poured themselves into and I feel the weight of this honour intensely. 

One of the great gifts this whole process has given me is to trust my instinct. I think it’s easy to equate digging deep into reading with having a certain education or intellectual capacity – that intimidation, internal or otherwise, is eclipsed by sheer wonder once inside a book, and that is liberating. Reading beyond fear or judgement or preconceived ideas is what translated fiction is especially good for. Learning this feels freeing as a writer as well as a reader. 

I love the other judges and our discussions when we meet – it’s fascinating to discover what has most resonated with each of us, to see where we align and where we don’t. Finding time to read is difficult when there is other work to do and family life to tend to, so making time for it is essential. I treat myself to reading in the bath and on long journeys on public transport. I enjoy the meaning that reading gives, even in the most mundane of any possible spare moment – not that there have been any spare moments in the last six months! 

Should people read more translated fiction, and if so why?  

Max Porter: Always and forever. In translation, not just literary activity but all discourse around the movement of ideas and stories between languages, we find our most progressive, open, empathetic and collaborative selves. I feel a profound urgency to this in our polarised times. Misinformation, propoganda, oligarch-owned news sources, these are powerful enemies of nuanced internationalist thought. Translated literature is a crucial tool in understanding one another better. It is the global consciousness at its most open, vulnerable and insightful. It’s where we might truly meet one another. It’s a shared nutrient base.  

Translated literature needn’t be specialist, on its own bookshop table, for the translation community or rarefied enthusiasts – it’s just books. It’s crime, fantasy, romance, sci-fi. It’s anything you can possibly imagine. It’s a way of moving around, widening the horizon, it’s a borderless world. In these days of crisis it seems to me vitally important that we find ways to travel and communicate over the hateful borders, literal and imaginary, imposed by those who would seek to curtail freedoms. 

Sana Goyal: A thousand times yes! We experience the world around us in translation. To read only English-original books is to have an incomplete, partial relationship with literature, with humanity. What can I say? Check your privilege, fix your ignorance.  

This past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about dominant, hegemonic narratives – and about erasures – how they are disseminated, drip-fed into our consciousness, and at what cost. As readers, we must demand more, demand better from the publishing industry — beyond buzzwords such as ‘diversity’, ‘inclusivity’, and ‘decolonisation’. So yes, read more translated fiction, but also acknowledge, champion, and fight for the rights of translators – their labour, praxis, and art as writers who break down walls in a world increasingly closing in on itself. 

Anton Hur: Yes, because reading translated fiction makes you sexy. Don’t you want to be sexy? If yes, like, read a Proust. Let’s not get into a discussion about which translation of Proust is the best – that is not a sexy discussion, stop that – but just read a Proust, any Proust. You don’t even have to understand everything about it or get anxious about whether the French has been rendered ‘faithfully’ or whatever; you will become instantly sexy. It doesn’t have to be Proust, there are so many authors from so many countries! Just go to a bookshop, pick up a translation, read the blurb, stare at the cover, and revel for a moment at the sexiness that is about to wash over you, emanate from you, take over your whole personality, your whole life. Men will love you, women will love you, enbys will love you – they will spread azaleas at your feet. Tread softly, because you tread on their dreams! 

Beth Orton: We live in a world where we believe we have access to every known and unknown corner of the earth, and yet we are ever more divided. I believe books will only become more important toward bridging the gaps in our understanding of one another. Fiction in translation is a very particular window that allows us to transcend our notions of cultures that seem utterly other to us otherwise. We find our common humanity and love in shared experience. The less isolated we feel, the more generous we become. Fiction is a community and fiction in translation is a global community, and that’s a hopeful and helpful prospect.