Why PEN Presents and the International Booker Prize have joined forces to support emerging translators

On 9 October, the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 was awarded to 53-year-old Korean writer Han Kang. As well as being the first Asian woman and first author born in the 1970s to become a Nobel laureate, she is also the third Nobel Prize winner in a row to have been recognised by the International Booker Prize (IBP) first, after Jon Fosse and Annie Ernaux. Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish novelist, became a Nobel laureate in 2019, a year after winning the IBP.

‘You’re the guys who do the Swedish Academy’s work for them,’ an editor from Publisher’s Weekly told me after the Nobel announcement. 

It didn’t start out this way. The IBP was founded in 2005 as a biennial global fiction prize for a body of work – a lifetime achievement award of sorts, often rewarding older venerated writers rather than sniffing out younger authors who, perhaps because of poor publishing or a lack of translation, were still relatively little known beyond their own countries. 

In 2016 it was transformed into an award offered every year for a single work of fiction translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland – mirroring, for different languages, the original Booker Prize, which by then had expanded its eligibility to any author writing in English and published in the UK or Ireland.

In the first year of its new iteration, publishers submitted books translated by 130 different people. They hailed from as far afield as Iceland, Indonesia and Italy, and worked in 34 languages, including Portuguese from Angola and Brazil and Spanish from Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico. Ever since 2016, the £50,000 award has been divided equally between author and translator.

Within less than a decade, the IBP has helped transform the publishing landscape, not just in the UK but throughout the English-speaking world. Translated fiction has become one of the fastest growing areas of the UK industry, with the number of sales rising 22% between 2021 and 2022. In 2022, two million volumes of translated fiction by living authors were sold in the UK. Half of these books were bought by reders aged under 35. 

Much of the most interesting work is published, not by the big conglomerates, but by small new independent houses often led by young visionary editors, such as French-born, British-educated Jacques Testard at Fitzcarraldo Editions, three of whose authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature since the company was founded a decade ago. Other publishers specialise in one particular area. Charco Press in Edinburgh, founded by Carolina Orloff and Samuel McDowell, focuses on contemporary literature from Latin America; Alina Martin’s Major Books on work from Vietnam.

By last year, works submitted for the IBP had been translated into English from 74 languages, with new ones added every year: Bengali, Kannada and Thai in 2017; Catalan, Latvian, Malay, Serbian and Uzbeck in 2018; Basque, Greenlandic and Kazakh in 2019; Bosnian, Farsi, Lithuanian and Tamil in 2020; Belarusan, Georgian, Gikuyu and Ukrainian in 2021; Hindi, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Telegu and Welsh in 2022; Bulgarian, Filipino and Romanian in 2023; Armenian and Galician in 2024.

The first Hindi novel ever submitted to the IBP, Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree and translated by Daisy Rockwell, won the top prize in 2022, and the first Bulgarian work, Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov and translated by Angela Rodel, carried the day in 2023.

For a lot of literary translators, the hardest part can be getting a foot on the ladder. Some countries support their writers by funding translations for publication. That is often true of countries where few people speak a particular language. Finland is very good at this, as is Catalonia and South Korea. But rarely does this kind of subvention extend to translators who are just starting out.

For this reason, the Booker Prize Foundation has now joined forces with English PEN to launch a scheme to help translators from the Global Majority take their first steps. Over the next few months, 12 scholarships of £500 each are to be offered to translators to help them create a 5,000-word translation sample. A final selection of six winners will be given editorial support and promoted as a showcase; hopefully leading to a potential translation and book-making adventure for a British or Irish publisher. 

English PEN could not be a better partner. One of the world’s oldest human-rights organisations, English PEN is a community of writers, readers and activists who work to protect freedom of expression under the banner ‘Freedom to write. Freedom to read’. The first line of the PEN charter, which was adopted at the PEN Congress in Copenhagen in 1948, begins with the words: ‘Literature knows no frontiers’. Advocacy is in PEN’s DNA. 

Helping translation is central to the practical work English PEN does to support writers and readers everywhere. For over a decade, its PEN Translates programme has helped publishers bring books from other languages to English readers. Its newer PEN Presents programme, it said at the launch of its partnership with the IBP a few weeks ago, ‘supports and showcases sample translations, funding the often-unpaid work of creating samples, giving UK publishers access to titles from underrepresented languages and regions, and helping to diversify the translated literature landscape’. 

Will Forrester, Head of Literature Programmes at English PEN, described the IBP collaboration as ‘an incredible opportunity to help expand the literary landscape’. 

Laurence Laluyaux, the London-based worldwide agent for Han Kang and Olga Tokarczuk, adds a plea: ‘Translators are conductors and it is crucial that the publishing industry supports excellent schemes such as this.’

There is more to the project than helping people forge a career. Translators are the great secret engine behind the fact that some works get any attention at all. It is they, often, who are the first to hear about an exciting writer, a thrilling new book. Without them, many books would languish, unread and unknown, at least as far as the wider world is concerned. 

Just how important this is can, perhaps, best be seen in hindsight. The first winner of the IBP in its new iteration in 2016 was a slim work of surprising poetry and eroticism. It was acquired in the UK by Max Porter at Portobello Books (now Granta Books) when a young English scholar named Deborah Smith, who had taught herself Korean, handed him seven typed pages after he gave a talk on translation at the London Book Fair. This was the opening chapter, translated into English, of a novel that had been written by a Korean woman a decade earlier. In ten years it had sold 20,000 copies. Today that book has been published in 47 languages and sold millions. In English the novel was titled The Vegetarian. Its author? The newest Nobel laureate, Han Kang. 

PEN Presents x International Booker Prize is open for applications from translators from the Global Majority. The deadline is 30 November 2024. To apply, visit englishpen.org/translation/pen-presents/apply-to-pen-presents/