Fiammetta Rocco

For the last two decades, Fiammetta Rocco has been synonymous in the publishing industry with the International Booker Prize, expertly appointing and guiding 15 panels through the judging process. In that time the prize has grown to become the world’s most influential award for translated fiction.  

Rocco worked on the prize from the beginning, when it was the Man Booker International Prize – a biennial prize launched in 2005 for a body of work and open to authors from around the world. She then collaborated with the team at Four Colman Getty to oversee the prize’s transition in 2015 to its current form, when it merged with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize to recognise individual works of fiction translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. 

Rocco is a writer and a critic. She grew up in Kenya in a Franco-Italian family and read Arabic at Oxford. She has been a judge of the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Booker Prize and the Royal Society Science Prize. In 2018 she chaired the judging panel for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. She is the author of The Miraculous Fever Tree: Malaria and the Cure that Changed the World. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.