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 readers 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.

Yet in the past eight years – during which the International Booker Prize has gained traction all over the world – there has been something noteworthy about the submissions: whereas representation of authors from the Global Majority has seen an increase, translators from the Global Majority, working from other languages into English, remain chronically under-represented, even though the Global Majority makes up about 80% of the world’s population. 

Since 2016, of the longlist of 13 books selected in any one year for the IBP, as many as seven have been written by authors of colour; in the past two years half the shortlist of six books has been written by an author of colour. Yet only in 2022 and 2023 has a translator of colour appeared on the shortlist, one only in each year. Before that, there was none. Of the 553 translators whose work has been submitted for the IBP since 2016, no more than a dozen have come from Asia. For nearly a decade, the only African translator to have been submitted was Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the 86-year-old Kenyan veteran who refuses for political reasons to write in any language but his native Gikuyu – and who translates his own work. 

‘It’s extremely difficult to get going as a literary translator,’ says Anton Hur, whose translation of Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny was shortlisted for the IBP in 2022. ‘I’m not American, I’m not white. I do not live in America or the UK. And I did not go to college overseas. I went to college in Korea and graduate school in Korea. So there’s really nothing in my résumé to indicate that I speak English at all, or that I can translate at a publishable level from Korean into English.’ 

Moreover, there still lingers in some quarters a conventional belief that translators should really only work into their mother tongue. ‘I can think of at least one venerable translator from Korean into English, an Englishman,’ Hur says, ‘who has gone on the record saying that people like me should not be literary translators; that people like me should be translating into Korean and not into English because English is not my native language.’

There are other barriers, too. The advent of AI poses a threat to the world of literary translation. On 4 November, Veen, Bosch and Keuning (VBK), the largest trade publisher in the Netherlands, confirmed that it planned to use AI to translate commercial fiction into English, prompting an outcry from translators and a leader in the Times. Even without AI, literary translation pays poorly and intermittently. Few (human) translators can be certain of regularly having five or six works commissioned each year that would allow them to make literary translation a full-time job; many also teach or work in publishing. 

That may be the main reason why literary translation gets so little support, at home or at school, as a course of further study. ‘It’s a real shame,’ says Federico Andornino, recently appointed executive publisher at Sceptre, who acquired Time Shelter when he was at Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Many people, he says, ‘simply don’t realise that this is a job that they can pursue’.

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/

Update: PEN Presents x International Booker Prize shortlist announced 

On 16 April 2025, English PEN and the Booker Prize Foundation announced the translators shortlisted for the inaugural round of PEN Presents x International Booker Prize, a grant programme launched to support translators from the Global Majority. 

• The shortlist features 12 titles, 13 translators, nine languages, and nine territories. 
• This is the first time the English PEN translation grants programme has supported work originally published in Malay, Filipino and Cebuano, and the first time it has supported work from Martinique and the Philippines. 
• Multiple projects from Palestine, the Philippines and Malaysia are supported in a single round of English PEN’s grant programmes for the first time. 
• 12 translators recognised for the first time by PEN Presents, with a second shortlisting for Tiffany Tsao.  
• The shortlisted projects are “staunchly distinct in character and voice, but united by the fact of their originality, timeliness and quality”. 

Since 2016, submissions to both English PEN’s PEN Translates programme and the International Booker Prize have told the same story: while the representation of authors of the Global Majority is increasing, translators from the Global Majority remain significantly underrepresented. PEN Presents x International Booker Prize was launched in 2024 to address this disparity by funding and promoting the work of Global Majority translators so that more literature in translation, created by more people, reaches English-language readers.  

For this round of PEN Presents, translators from the Global Majority, based anywhere in the world, were invited to submit proposals to create sample translations of previously untranslated works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories by any author, from any language and region, and of any style, genre and era. PEN Presents supports and showcases sample translations, funding the often-unpaid work of creating samples and giving UK publishers access to titles from underrepresented languages and regions. The International Booker Prize is the world’s most influential award for translated fiction and each year it awards the best work of fiction translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. 

This shortlist announcement follows the news that a previous PEN Presents winner has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025: Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi. The collection, which emerged through the first round of PEN Presents in 2022 before being published by And Other Stories, is the first work translated from Kannada to appear on the International Booker Prize shortlist – underscoring the impact of the initiative. 

The PEN Presents x International Booker Prize shortlist is:

• Christian Jil R. Benitez for a translation from the Filipino of Time of the Eye by Alvin B. Yapan (Philippines)  
• John Bengan for a translation from the Cebuano of The Man With a Thousand Names: Stories by R. Joseph Dazo (Philippines) 
• YZ Chin for a translation from the Chinese of Storied Ruins by Teng Kuan Kiat (Malaysia) 
• Nayereh Doosti for a translation from the Persian of A Tale in Ruins by Aboutorab Khosravi (Iran) 
• Pauline Fan for a translation from the Malay of The Last Days of Jesselton by Ruhaini Matdarin (Malaysia) 
• Mayada Ibrahim and Najlaa Eltom for a translation from the Arabic of Ireem by Stella Gaitano (Sudan) 
• Annalise Peters for a translation from the French (with Martinican Creole) of My Heart Beats Fast by Nadia Chonville (Martinique) 
• Özsu Riv for a translation from the Turkish of My Mother’s Rib by Burçin Tetik (Turkey) 
• Tiffany Tsao for a translation from the Indonesian of The Born Out of Wedlock Club by Grace Tioso (Indonesia) 
• Victoria Issa Yacoub for a translation from the Arabic of The Light by Israa Kalash (Palestine) 
• Catherine Xinxin Yu for a translation from the Chinese of Little Brother by Chan Wai (Taiwan) 
• Anam Zafar for a translation from the Arabic of Playing With Soldiers by Tariq Asrawi (Palestine) 

The shortlist was selected by a cross-sector panel of seven experts, chaired by Preti Taneja, writer, Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and English PEN Translation Advisory Co-chair. She was joined by Safae El-Ouahabi, Associate at RCW; Elisabeth Jaquette, translator from the Arabic and Executive Director of Words Without Borders; Željka Marošević, Editorial Director at Jonathan Cape; Nii Ayikwei Parkes, writer, editor and Director at flipped eye publishing; Fiammetta Rocco, Administrator of the International Booker Prize; and Shash Trevett, poet and translator from the Tamil.

The shortlisted translators each receive £500 grants to create 5,000-word sample translations of their proposed projects. Independent assessors, drawn from English PEN’s pool of established literary translators, are commissioned to evaluate the samples and original works, before the Selection Panel then select six projects as PEN Presents x International Booker Prize winners. The winning translators receive editorial support, working with English PEN, editors and experienced translators on their samples, with the winners announced and the samples published and promoted to UK publishers in Summer 2025. 

Update: Winners announced for inaugural PEN Presents x International Booker Prize programme

The scheme supports translators from the Global Majority, and the six winning projects represent five languages and regions. Read the full story here.