Nilanjana S. Roy interview: ‘Great fiction takes you to places beyond the reach of maps’
International Booker Prize 2026 judge Nilanjana S. Roy reflects on the power of translated fiction to change hearts and minds – and why busy people, especially, should find time to read more
Main image © Sophie Davidson for Booker Prize Foundation
You will read more than 100 books over seven months as an International Booker Prize judge. How are you approaching this unique challenge, and what are your tips for busy people who want to find more time for reading?
We’re spending this year with over 200 gifted, creative authors and translators, the murmur of languages from at least five continents in our ears. I’ve spent most of my life reading for work and for pleasure, but reading for the International Booker is a true gift, an experience with few parallels.
The actual reading is a breeze: start reading at 6am, finish reading by 2am, and embrace the social life of a misanthropic ascetic for a year. More seriously, the real challenge is to make sure that you give every book a fair chance, to try to read with generosity and openness as well as a critical eye.
The Financial Times’ Literary Editor, Fred Studemann was part of the 2023 jury and gave me a really useful tip: make notes as you read each book, when it’s still fresh in your mind. It’s the only way to do justice to everything we read, given the pace at which the books arrive.
Busy people need to know that reading is one of the greatest refuges you can give yourself from the rushed schedule, the overflowing day. I’d suggest scheduling unbreakable bookshop and library appointments into your month, just as you do with corporate engagements.
Scatter physical books around your home and workspaces, so that you never have to hunt for something to read – it’s much easier to build a reading habit that way.
Load up your Kindle before long business trips – if you don’t have time to browse or research what to read, look out for Best of 2026 or Summer Reading / Holiday Reading book lists in the newspapers. Or just buy everything on the International Booker longlists from 2016 onwards, and I promise you’re sorted for life.
What are you hoping to find as you select the books for the International Booker Prize longlist? Are there certain qualities or attributes that you’re looking for?
Fiction is such a vast landscape; cleverly planned gardens here, wilderness and ancient grasslands over there, room enough for both. It’s easy to stick with what’s familiar to today’s readers, but writers tend to be far-seers, and the best of fiction, however timely, also has a quality of timelessness to it. You could imagine returning to those books again and again, or re-reading them decades later, and still being surprised or entertained.
I hope to discover authors and translators from all over, including those who live and create in languages that are not historically dominant, whose books will remain a source of illumination or astonishment, or will continue to unsettle readers, 10 or 20 years from now. Speaking personally, I’m especially curious about storytelling traditions that broaden your sense of what a novel or a short story can be. Good fiction can take you to interesting places; great fiction takes you to places that are beyond the reach of maps.
What do you think, if anything, good translations can bring to the original language version of a work of fiction?
As a writer, I know first-hand that translators perform miracles – they are shapeshifters and choreographers, as well as co-authors. A great translation captures the spirit, energy and rhythm of the original, but it can also illuminate or deepen aspects of the text. Just as singers interpret the same raga in diverse shades, and conductors stay faithful to a concerto or an opera while offering strikingly different interpretations, every great translator breathes fresh life into novels and stories.
The International Booker Prize 2026 judges – l-r Nilanjana S. Roy, Marcus du Sautoy, Troy Onyango, Natasha Brown and Sophie Hughes – photographed at Poon’s London
© Sophie Davidson for Booker Prize FoundationThe awakening of curiosity or empathy challenges unthinking hate… Much of modern translated fiction has the power to cut through propaganda and bigotry, simply by letting us see each other more clearly
The International Booker Prize is celebrating its 10th birthday in its current form in 2026. How do you think the prize has changed the landscape and the perception of translated fiction over the last decade, and why does this award matter?
As a reader, I probably discovered more authors and translators through the International Booker’s longlists than through any other literary award. I read somewhere that the prize has featured books from over 60 languages since 2016 – for readers like me, we’re discovering authors we could not have found in any other way.
I love that the International Booker Prize gave equal respect and space to translators from its inception in 2016, and that has helped deepen the conversation around translation. Readers under 30 are, famously, very open to reading in translation, and this prize has created a platform for – and a thoughtful conversation around – translation over the years. Winners experience a massive ‘Booker boom’ in sales. The prize is trusted by readers, much like the other Booker Prize – perhaps because the International Booker works extremely hard behind the scenes to try to maintain integrity, ethics and a sense of literary value throughout the awards process.
Perhaps juries notice this more than readers, but the submissions to the International Booker Prize are also a running tribute to independent publishers, often small houses with an appetite for risk and a thirst for discovery.
An example of why it matters – in 2022, Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell, became the first novel in Hindi to win the International Booker Prize, and in 2025, Banu Mushtaq won for Heart Lamp, written in Kannada and translated by Deepa Bhasthi, sparking celebrations and a sense of pride across India. Hindi is spoken by roughly 345 million people, and Kannada has a literary tradition that goes back over 2,000 years – and yet, most global readers know Indian fiction chiefly via English-language works. I imagine many countries around the world have a similar story – the recognition and the visibility that the International Booker Prize brings in its wake restores a balance that had been tilted too far towards English.
The theme of the International Booker Prize 2026 campaign is ‘Fiction beyond borders’. How do you think the International Booker, and translated fiction generally, helps readers see beyond geographical boundaries? Why is that important?
We live in a time when old wars and ancient bigotries are, unfortunately, being revived, and when the world can feel fractured and fragmented. I’m a realist, and while I understand that literature might not change geopolitics, it does change hearts and minds.
Translations bring us closer together, help us understand and listen to one another; it makes the strange familiar, and a good translation is so often a portal to another realm. You can only hate or distrust what you don’t know – the awakening of curiosity or empathy challenges unthinking hate. As with some forms of music or film, much of modern translated fiction has the power to cut through propaganda and bigotry, simply by letting us see each other more clearly.
What’s your favourite International Booker-nominated book since 2016 and what’s special about it? Who would you recommend it to?
It’s so hard to choose just one! Three of my favourites to give to readers just crossing the threshold into their 20s, because these are gateway drugs into the pleasure of translated fiction: The Vegetarian by Han Kang (winner, 2016), translated by Deborah Smith; Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft (winner, 2018); The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L Strayer (shortlisted, 2019).
What book made you fall in love with reading as a child? How and why did it capture your imagination?
AA Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories were hypnotic. In my imagination, our back garden transformed into the Hundred Acre Wood, and I joined Pooh and Piglet on ‘Expotitions’. But the love of reading, the pleasure of language itself, also came from Abol Tabol, Sukumar Ray’s timeless, deathless collection of Bengali nonsense verse, first published in 1923, still loved and recited by generations of children.
And the first book I read to pieces, loving these stories of a Russian family adopted by heaps of animals from tigers to donkeys and wolves, was a translation – the Soviet author Olga Perovskaya’s funny, poignant Kids and Cubs (1966), translated by Fainna Glagoleva. Perovskaya made me laugh, and cry buckets, and want to either adopt wolves or be a young wolf: it was everything you could want from literature.
International Booker Prize 2026 judge, Nilanjana S. Roy photographed at Poon’s London
© Sophie Davidson for Booker Prize Foundation
