Sophie Hughes interview: ‘Reading fiction is a tonic, taking you out of yourself to come back to yourself’
International Booker Prize 2026 judge Sophie Hughes reflects on the sense of connection translated fiction can bring, and the qualities she’s looking for among this year’s submissions
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?
Even if I’d done my maths before accepting this role, which I didn’t because I was always going to say yes, I don’t think I could have prepared myself for the, let’s say, persistent nature of the reading requirement. I prefer not to use the word ‘relentless’ because judging the International Booker Prize isn’t a hardship, quite the opposite – it’s made me a much more competent and generous reader and given me hours of reading pleasure (and sadness, fear, anger, glee, disgust…).
But still, there are evenings when, having put my other work and two children to bed, I get an irrepressible and unprecedented urge to feel nothing, to zone out in front of crap content. This not being an option (thanks, chair Natasha, for the spreadsheet showing in the plainest terms how many pages we might like to read a day if we wanted to keep up), instead I pick up my book. And after a couple of pages of resistance (my attention resists, my tired eyes resist, my to-do-list-addled brain resists, even my conscience resists, telling me to check the news or check in on that friend) eventually I zone in and the book starts making me feel things I wasn’t feeling before. Reading fiction is a tonic, taking you out of yourself to come back to yourself. I’m more convinced than ever that it is the perfect pastime for busy people.
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?
It turns out that I want authors to be very proficient storytellers, even if they choose to tell their stories obliquely, in reverse, in fragments, as collage, or even self-reflexively.
I want the worldbuilding to be so generous and effective it’s as if a filter has fallen over my eyes when I open the book and re-enter that world, and I want to be there all the time.
I’m looking for translations that show that good translators are just good writers with a different set of constraints. (There are some virtuosos in our midst…) I think my fellow judges and I are all looking for books that linger.
What do you think, if anything, good translations can bring to the original language version of a work of fiction?
My honest answer is that a good translation (assuming the original book is good) brings everything. If a book isn’t well translated, it won’t translate – it won’t cross over, won’t reach anyone or communicate anything. It simply won’t live to tell the tale.
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 FoundationIn some parts of the anglosphere, literary translation feels increasingly like counterculture
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?
You know that feeling when you’re reading a novel or story and something happens or someone says something that resonates with you louder than your own thoughts? I’ve had that sense of electrifying connection multiple times over the last seven months, often while reading books by authors from places and cultures I am not only removed from but totally ignorant of. The books I’ve loved the most have been the ones where, when I least expected it, I’ve thought: we’re thinking the same thing.
What’s your favourite International Booker-nominated book since 2016 and what’s special about it? Who would you recommend it to?
Vernon Subutex 1 by Virginie Despentes, translated by Frank Wynne (MacLehose Press). For the person in your life who has inherited the notion that all translations are dry and flat. I’m sure the original version is very good, but the English version is perfection on its own terms.
What book made you fall in love with reading as a child? How and why did it capture your imagination?
I’ve given different answers to this question before, because so many books helped turn me into a reader. In hindsight, I appreciate the ones that didn’t patronise in any way, that left me feeling a bit confused and stretched and scared by concepts and events I didn’t fully understand: Willie’s abusive mother in Michelle Magorian’s Goodnight Mister Tom. I know now that I was extremely lucky to have that early exposure to other people’s lives through books: sometimes they gave me comfort, and sometimes they made me uncomfortable – both essential building blocks of empathy.
International Booker Prize 2026 judge, Sophie Hughes photographed at Poon’s London
© Sophie Davidson for Booker Prize Foundation
