As Yáng Shuāng-zǐ accepted the 2026 International Booker prize at the Tate Modern on Tuesday night for Taiwan Travelogue, alongside her translator Lin King, she used her speech to speak frankly about the political questions at the centre of her novel, set in 1930s Japan-occupied Taiwan. “Some people believe that art and literature must be kept far from politics,” Yáng told the audience. “But I believe that literature cannot be separated from the soil in which it has grown.”

When we speak the following morning, the 41-year-old writer returns quickly to the same theme. “Taiwanese people are suffering from an identity crisis,” she tells me. “Some of us believe ourselves to be Chinese and then others believe that we are Taiwanese, and I wanted to express that somehow through my book. As Taiwanese people, we need to ask ourselves now – do we want to go back to being colonised? Do we want to have to live like that again? Be second-class citizens in our own land? I refuse.”

Those anxieties lie at the heart of Taiwan Travelogue, the first book originally written in Mandarin to win the £50,000 prize. Presented as the translation of a rediscovered travel memoir from 1938, the novel follows Aoyama, a Japanese novelist with a “monstrous appetite” touring Taiwan on a government-sponsored culinary trip. There she meets an enigmatic Taiwanese interpreter, Chizuru, with whom she becomes infatuated. Each chapter is named after a Taiwanese delicacy – braised minced pork, sliced raw fish, melon tea – creating a synaesthesia of taste, texture and longing. “Research for the novel’s central themes of travel and food changed my life in two obvious ways: my savings went down; my weight went up,” Yáng has previously joked.

Although it is set in the 30s, Taiwan Travelogue feels unmistakably modern in the questions it asks about national identity and colonialism. Taiwan remains one of the most politically sensitive territories in the world: a self-governing democracy claimed by Beijing as part of China, with the constant threat of military escalation hanging over it. Just last week, Donald Trump warned Taiwan against declaring independence, in some of the strongest language a US president has used thus far on the subject.

Born Yáng Jo-tzu, the writer adopted the pen name Shuāng-zǐ, meaning “twins”, as a tribute to her late twin sister, Yáng Jo-hui, who helped research the historical background of Taiwan Travelogue before her death. The novel is Yáng’s first to be translated into English but it has already had an extraordinary trajectory, becoming a literary sensation in Taiwan after its publication in 2020, then winning the National Book Award for translated literature in the US in 2024, and now the International Booker prize – an honour she describes as “surreal”.

The novel’s structural playfulness is central to its appeal. When Taiwan Travelogue first appeared in Mandarin, some readers believed it really was a rediscovered Japanese colonial-era text. In English, King leaned even further into that hall-of-mirrors effect, preserving and expanding the footnotes and competing narrative voices. The book’s fictional translators’ notes and editorial interventions create what International Booker judging chair Natasha Brown described as an “intriguing metafictional layer”.

“I appreciate that it’s a really hard book to read,” King says, laughing. “It’s been really heartening to see people willing to put in the work, when we’re constantly being told everyone’s attention is divided, nobody can do anything for more than two minutes at a time.”

The novel’s slipperiness in form echoes its emotional core. Aoyama and Chizuru’s relationship unfolds through interpretation and misinterpretation. Chizuru, the Taiwanese-born daughter of a concubine, feels herself socially inferior to Aoyama, an acclaimed Japanese novelist travelling under the protection of the colonial government. “It’s a story about love, but it is also a story about how love cannot overcome power dynamics,” Yáng says. “Love doesn’t overcome the differences between ruling-class and second-class citizens.”

Like Yáng, 33-year-old King, who is Taiwanese-American, is bracingly candid about the inextricability of art and politics. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she saw echoes of Taiwan’s own geopolitical precarity, prompting her to pledge to translate only Taiwanese writing for the foreseeable future.

“My goal for myself and my fellow translators is to bring so many voices from Taiwan into English that no one can reduce Taiwan’s literature to a monolith,” she said on stage at the Tate. “Because we are not a chorus but a cacophony, self-contradicting and unruly, just like any healthy, robust democracy.”

The novel’s queerness is also central to that vision of Taiwan as a democratic society. Aoyama’s fascination with Chizuru is constrained by social convention. Yáng, who is in a relationship with a woman, sees the novel as part of a “rich heritage of queer literature” in Taiwan that emerged in the 90s. “But what I specifically wanted to write about is relationships between women in every form. Love between women.”

Taiwan has long occupied a distinctive position within Asia on LGBTQ+ rights. In 2019 it became the first Asian territory to legalise same-sex marriage, and remains one of only three in the region to do so. “I believe we are the most progressive state in the whole of east Asia,” Yáng says. “Whether that’s LGBTQ+ rights or women’s rights, we’re setting an example.”

The International Booker uniquely splits its award equally between author and translator, highlighting translation as part of the creative process. And the success of Taiwan Travelogue comes amid growing anglophone interest in translated fiction, sales of which have surged in recent years. In 2023, UK readers spent £23m on translated fiction books, up by 12% from the previous year, and the largest purchase group was 25-34-year-olds.

While Taiwan Travelogue was published in the US in 2024, it took two more years for it to be released in the UK because no publisher was willing to put King’s name on the front cover as well as Yáng’s. That is until independent publisher And Other Stories came along, which is now celebrating its second consecutive International Booker prize win – last year’s award was won by Indian author Banu Mushtaq for Heart Lamp, translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi.

For King, the importance of translated fiction is self-evident. “The beauty of reading is that you’re being transported to a reality that is not your own, and learning about it, and that is epitomised by translated literature,” she says. “Whenever I look at prizes like this one, I feel so ignorant going down the longlist and thinking, ‘Wow, I didn’t even know that dictatorship existed, I didn’t know about that genocide or that change of regime or that dialect and how it’s been oppressed.’ There is just so much to learn.”

Not only has Taiwan Travelogue opened Taiwan up to readers unfamiliar with its history, King tells me that it has also resonated deeply with younger Taiwanese readers and the diaspora abroad.

“A lot of people have told me that it was their first time seeing Taiwan featured in such a way in an English-language book, and that it’s reinvigorated their interest to learn more about Taiwan,” she says. “That is one of the things I’m most happy about.”

Taiwan Travelogue, a novel written by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated by Lin King, has become the first book originally written in Mandarin Chinese to win the International Booker prize.

Yáng and King were announced as the winners of the £50,000 prize – to be split equally between them – during a ceremony at Tate Modern, London, on Tuesday evening.

The novel is presented as a translation of a rediscovered memoir, written from the perspective of a novelist who sails to Japan-occupied Taiwan in 1938 and embarks on a culinary tour in the company of an interpreter, with whom she falls in love. The book features fictional footnotes and afterwords by the book’s characters as well as “real” ones by King, which “wrap an intriguing metafictional layer around its core love story”, said judging chair and novelist Natasha Brown.

It’s the second year in a row that the Sheffield-based independent press And Other Stories has taken home the prize, following Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, last year.

Taiwan Travelogue “pulls off an incredible double feat”, added Brown, succeeding as “both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel”.

Yáng and King are the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners of the prize, which recognises the best fiction translated into English. The original Mandarin Chinese publication won Taiwan’s highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod award, and King’s English translation won the US National book award for translated literature in 2024.

Along with fiction, Yáng writes essays, manga and video game scripts. King also writes original fiction – her debut novel, Weeb, is forthcoming.

In a March interview on the Booker prize website, Yáng said that she began writing because of the boom in Taiwanese romance novels in the mid-90s. “My middle school classmates decided to form a writing group together, though of the five of us, I’m the only one who kept writing,” she said.

Asked about the inspiration for Taiwan Travelogue, Yáng explained that while “both Korea and Taiwan were once colonies of the Japanese empire”, Koreans “seem to feel uniformly resentful of that history, whereas Taiwanese people regard it with a much more conflicted mix of distaste and nostalgia. Using a contemporary Taiwanese lens, I wanted to untangle the complex circumstances that Taiwan’s people faced in the past, and to explore what kind of future we ought to strive toward.”

Taiwan Travelogue prevailed over five other shortlisted titles: The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin, The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump, She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, translated by Izidora Angel, On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Padma Viswanathan, and The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated by Ruth Martin.

Brown was joined on the judging panel by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, translator Sophie Hughes, and the writers Troy Onyango and Nilanjana S Roy. This year’s prize was open to long-form fiction and short-story collections translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 May 2025 and 30 April 2026.

Previous winners of the International Booker prize include Han Kang for The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, and Olga Tokarczuk for Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft.

• To browse all shortlisted titles for The International Booker prize 2026, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

This year’s International Booker prize shortlisted titles are a diverse bunch, both geographically – from Brazil to Taiwan – and in style, from mainstream blockbuster to experimental jeu d’esprit. As in recent years, independent presses are rewarded for their efforts in promoting translated fiction, providing four of the six titles. And the campaign for proper recognition of translators is finally paying off: for the first time in the prize’s 10-year history, all six books name the translator on the front cover. Here’s our guide to the prospects for each, ahead of the winner announcement on 19 May.

German-Iranian novelist Shida Bazyar reminds us in her novel The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran (Scribe), translated by Ruth Martin, that the people of Iran are the victims of history many times over. The story comes from four members of an Iranian family over 30 years. In 1979, young Behzad greets the Islamic revolution that deposes the Shah, but his hopes for a communist utopia (“a new Cuba”) are thwarted. Instead, he’s surrounded by people who have been waiting for the chance to become bullies all their lives. He and his wife, Nahid, flee to Germany: she takes over the story in 1989, followed by their daughter, Laleh, in 1999.

Laleh visits Iran, amazed by the cultural differences from Germany. What she looks down on, they look up to – “I would never wear gold, no one wears gold, except here” – and also, people in Iran love Ricky Martin unironically. In 2009, Laleh’s brother Mo hears about protests across the Middle East, and his excitement – “As soon as Ahmadinejad is gone, it’ll kick off in Egypt, too [ … ] and eventually all the dictators will be out” – is even more heartbreaking in the context of Iran today. A timely novel doesn’t always deliver – see last year’s Small Boat – but this novel’s depth and empathy would make it a worthy winner any year.

The Witch (Vintage), translated by Jordan Stump, is a deep cut from French novelist Marie NDiaye’s back catalogue – it was first published in 1996. “When my daughters turned 12 I initiated them into the mysterious powers,” it opens, irresistibly. Narrator Lucie has powers of divination and can see people’s futures – and when she does, she cries tears of blood. She dislikes being a witch (“Did I lack the will, the intensity, the rage?”) but still teaches her daughters, as her mother taught her.

Set against this weirdness is a complex comedy of domestic discontent: Lucie’s timeshare-salesman husband runs off with the family money; then she tries to reunite her separated parents (bad news: her father has had a fake tan and dyed his hair). She begins to lose everyone, and her powers are useless to help her; thus the book raises knotty questions about how we make use of our capabilities. This accessible but surprising novel is perfect for newcomers to NDiaye, but the acceleration of events as the story proceeds, and the somewhat arbitrary ending, are frustrating: I don’t expect it to take the prize.

In Brazilian Ana Paula Maia’s previous novel Of Cattle and Men, cows were slaughtered. Now, in On Earth As It Is Beneath (Charco), translated by Padma Viswanathan, it’s the men’s turn. A penal colony for the worst criminals started out with 42 inmates: now there are only three prisoners, as the warden Melquíades – “eaten away by the system he defends” – keeps releasing, hunting and shooting them. Authorities are coming to close the colony down – that is, if those remaining can survive long enough.

In a strange way, this book has classic sitcom elements: people who can’t get along, stuck together and facing one mess after another. The tension between absurdity and grotesque violence gives the book an effervescent energy, and turns it into an existential thriller, all in 100 pages. Confusion reigns, power balances shift, and nobody on the outside cares what happens to the men anyway. As it turns out, this brilliant novel is loosely connected to Of Cattle and Men; you don’t have to read both to get it, but you’ll probably want to. This is an eccentric but very deserving contender.

Perhaps the most formally inventive book on this year’s shortlist is Bulgarian Rene Karabash’s She Who Remains (Peirene), translated by Izidora Angel. It’s narrated by 33-year-old Bekija, a woman in rural Albania, living under archaic traditions. The narrative jumps about, mostly told in a prose poetry without full stops. Details bubble up through repetition: her violent father’s disappointment (“your father wanted a son, but out came you”); how years ago Bekija jilted her fiance, and revenge was exacted by his family; her black-sheep brother Sále’s estrangement; and Bekija’s decision to become a “sworn virgin”, that is, a woman who lives as a man.

There is plenty of powerful eye-catching – and stomach-turning – activity here, as well as a love story hidden rather deep in the backstory, but the book’s eccentric form keeps the reader at a distance, and many elements only come to make sense in retrospect. This may have benefited the novel in the Booker stakes, where the judges reread longlisted titles and gain the benefit of things a first-time reader will miss. Still, this spiky and challenging story looks like a long shot for the prize.

Equally experimental but more playful and approachable is Taiwanese writer Yáng Shuāg-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue (And Other Stories), translated by Lin King. “Hold on. What’s going on here?” it opens, aptly. What’s going on is a novel disguised as a rediscovered travel memoir, complete with multiple afterwords and fictional footnotes alongside the translator’s real ones. It’s set in 1938, where a Japanese-Taiwanese novelist named Aoyama goes on a food tour of Taiwan. (So the book works as a recipe guide too.)

Aoyama has “monster” appetites, which may be concealing something else: she grows fond of her female guide Chi-chan, but struggles to articulate it. “Whenever I start craving something, anything, my stomach burns with this insatiable greed [ …] You’ve been the only one to appease this monster.” But social strictures of gender and class – Chi-chan is a concubine’s daughter – make things harder. At heart this is a simple love story that educates as it entertains, though it takes a long time to get to where it’s going, and the complex structure seems more like window dressing than essential to its ideas. It will charm many readers, but may not be weighty enough to win.

Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director (Riverrun), translated by Ross Benjamin, is the most mainstream novel on the shortlist: a delightful and illuminating chunk of literary fiction that animates the wartime experiences of the German film-maker GW Pabst., “one of the great directors. A master, a legend.” Trapped in Germany when the borders close, Pabst must decide whether he will work for the Nazis if that’s the only way he can get to keep making films.

The book is full of big characters, real and invented – an obsequious antisemitic caretaker; a threatening government minister; Leni Riefenstahl with her “skull-like smile”. Pabst believes “I’m not a political person”, but he must learn that everything is political now. No one can ignore what is happening: not film-makers; not prisoner of war PG Wodehouse, who narrates one chapter; not even humble critics. “Critics? We have no critics! Criticism is a Jewish genre that no one needs.” It is not only its traditional form and direct plot that make The Director stand out on the shortlist, but its range, characterisation, wit and chilling relevance. The International Booker judges have a history of going for smaller-scale titles, but this would be a very popular winner, and a fully deserving one.

Daniel Kehlmann, Marie NDiaye and Yáng Shuāng-zǐ are among the six authors shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker prize, as the award marks its 10th anniversary.

The annual prize celebrates the best works of fiction translated into English, and awards £50,000 to one author-translator pair, to be split equally.

Authors Rene Karabash, Shida Bazyar and Ana Paula Maia are also shortlisted for the prize. The winning book will be announced on 19 May.

German author Daniel Kehlmann earns his second shortlisting for The Director, translated by Ross Benjamin, a novel inspired by the life of film-maker GW Pabst and his entanglement with Nazi Germany. “The Director has all the darkness, shapeshifting ambiguity and glittering unease of a modern Grimms’ fairytale,” wrote Nina Allan in a Guardian review. “It is Kehlmann’s best work yet.”

French writer Marie NDiaye, meanwhile, reaches the shortlist for the first time with The Witch, translated by Jordan Stump, a darkly comic novel originally published in French in 1996. NDiaye was previously longlisted for the prize in 2016, and was shortlisted in the prize’s earlier version in 2013, when it recognised writers for their entire body of work.

Taiwanese author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ is shortlisted for Taiwan Travelogue, translated by Lin King, which follows a Japanese woman’s journey through 1930s Taiwan under colonial rule. The novel won Taiwan’s highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod award, when originally published in Mandarin Chinese in 2020.

The six shortlisted books “capture moments from across the past century, these books reverberate with history”, according to judging chair and author Natasha Brown. “Rereading each book, we found hope, insight and burning humanity – along with unforgettable characters to whom I’m sure readers will return again and again.”

Two debuts feature on the shortlist: The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by German author Shida Bazyar, translated by Ruth Martin, which traces an Iranian family’s journey through revolution and exile, and She Who Remains by Bulgarian writer Rene Karabash, translated by Izidora Angel, a coming-of-age story set in a patriarchal Albanian community.

Also on the list is On Earth As It Is Beneath by Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia, translated by Padma Viswanathan, a novella set in a brutal former slave plantation turned penal colony.

Five of the six authors are women, as are four of the six translators, and the books were originally written in five different languages, with authors and translators together representing eight nationalities.

The judging panel selected the shortlist from a longlist of 13 titles, themselves chosen from 128 submissions. Each shortlisted title receives £5,000. The rest of the longlist was made up of We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated by Robin Myers; The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje, translated by David McKay; The Deserters by Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell; Small Comfort by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson; The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre, translated by Antonella Lettieri; Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur, translated by Faridoun Farrokh; and The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken.

Joining Brown on this year’s judging panel are mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, translator Sophie Hughes, and the writers Troy Onyango and Nilanjana S Roy.

Last year, the prize went to Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi.

Olga Ravn, Daniel Kehlmann, Ia Genberg, Mathias Énard and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara are among those longlisted for the International Booker prize, which recognises the best translated fiction and turns 10 this year.

A “Booker dozen” of 13 books were longlisted for this year’s prize. One author-translator pair will win £50,000, to be split equally.

Ravn, Kehlmann, Genberg, Énard and Cabezón Cámara have all previously been shortlisted for the prize. This year, German author Kehlmann was chosen for The Director, translated by Ross Benjamin, which is inspired by the life of the film-maker GW Pabst, who collaborated with the Third Reich.

“The Director has all the darkness, shapeshifting ambiguity and glittering unease of a modern Grimms’ fairytale,” wrote Nina Allan in a Guardian review. “It is Kehlmann’s best work yet.”

Danish writer Ravn was selected for her fourth novel, The Wax Child, translated by Martin Aitken, which is about real-life 17th-century Danish witch trials.

Witchcraft appears elsewhere on the longlist, in French writer Marie NDiaye’s The Witch, translated by Jordan Stump, published in its original French in 1996. NDiaye was previously longlisted for the prize in 2016, and was shortlisted in the prize’s earlier incarnation in 2013, when it recognised writers for their entire body of work.

Another longlisted title published in its original language several decades ago is Women Without Men by Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur, translated by Faridoun Farrokh, which was published in Persian in 1989. In the 80s, Parsipur was imprisoned in Iran for five years. Soon after her release, she published Women Without Men and was jailed again. The book, in which five women from different life paths end up living together in a garden on the outskirts of Tehran, has been banned in Iran since 1989.

Swedish author Genberg made this year’s longlist for Small Comfort, translated by Kira Josefsson, a set of five interconnected stories. Meanwhile, Énard was longlisted for The Deserters, translated by Charlotte Mandell, which marks the 17th International Booker nomination for Fitzcarraldo, the most-nominated imprint in the prize’s history.

Another independent publisher recognised this year is Peirene Press with She Who Remains by Bulgarian writer Rene Karabash, translated by Izidora Angel, about a woman who avoids an arranged marriage by becoming a sworn virgin.

Karabash is one of three debut writers on this year’s longlist, alongside German author Shida Bazyar with The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, translated by Ruth Martin, and The Duke by Italian author Matteo Melchiorre, translated by Antonella Lettieri.

Argentinian writer Cabezón Cámara was nominated for We Are Green and Trembling, translated by Robin Myers, which won the US National Book Award for translated literature last year.

Completing this year’s longlist is The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje, translated by David McKay; On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Padma Viswanathan; and Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King.

“Many of the submitted books examined the devastating consequences of war, which is reflected in our longlist,” said judging chair and novelist Natasha Brown. “The list also features petty squabbles between neighbours, mysterious mountain villages, big pharma conspiracies, witchy women, ill-fated lovers, a haunted prison, and obscure film references. The page counts range from ‘pocket-friendly’ to ‘doorstopper’. And while the books’ original publication dates span four decades, each story feels fresh and innovative.”

This year’s shortlist of six books will be announced on 31 March, with each shortlisted title receiving £5,000, to be split equally between author and translator. The winner will be announced on 19 May at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London.

Joining Brown on this year’s judging panel are mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, translator Sophie Hughes, and the writers Troy Onyango and Nilanjana S Roy.

The longlist was selected from 128 titles published in the UK or Ireland between 1 May 2025 and 30 April 2026. Booker prize foundation chief executive Gaby Wood said that this year’s submissions of books were originally written in a record total of 34 languages – “a sign, perhaps, that translated works from an ever-broader range of original languages are increasingly available to anglophone readers”.

Last year, Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, became the first collection of short stories to take home the award. Other previous winners include Han Kang, Olga Tokarczuk and Georgi Gospodinov.

Wood noted that four authors recognised by the prize for a single book have gone on to win the Nobel for their body of work: Han, Tokarczuk, Jon Fosse – who was longlisted for the International Booker in 2020 and shortlisted in 2022 – and László Krasznahorkai, who was shortlisted in 2018.

A translation renaissance in US publishing just ended. And you probably missed it.

In 2008, the publisher Alfred A. Knopf published Stieg Larsson’s posthumous The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; this was the first time since 1954 that a novel translated from Swedish to English (in this case by Steven Murray under the pseudonym Reg Keeland) landed on the New York Times (NYT) bestseller list. For a modest five weeks, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo stayed on the coveted list. The following year, however, its sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, hit the list for 21 weeks. With the release of the third title in the Millennium series, Knopf benefitted from buzz around the franchise and the highly anticipated cinematic adaptation of book one. The result was unprecedented. According to our analysis of 90 years of the NYT hardcover bestseller lists, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest spent nearly 80 weeks—more than a year and a half—in a top 10 spot. This gives Larsson’s novel the record of securing the longest length of time on the NYT bestseller list of any translated novel—from any language—ever.

Larsson’s trilogy was a harbinger of what would prove to be the richest burst of translated bestsellers in the US in more than half a century. For example, the ensuing decade saw tremendous success for the genre of “Nordic Noir,” what Karl Berglund calls “one of the most important genres in the top commercial segment of the contemporary global book trade.” For bestsellers in the US, this has included titles by Jo Nesbø, Henning Mankell, and Fredrik Backman, as well as David Lagercrantz, who continued the series after Larsson’s death, and Lars Kepler (a pseudonym that is also an homage to Larsson). However, genre alone doesn’t explain what we’ve experienced. Bestseller lists in the US from this period also featured Nordic authors outside the noir genre such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, as well as works in translation by authors writing in non-Nordic languages, including Haruki Murakami (Japanese); Isabel Allende and Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Spanish); Paulo Coelho (Portuguese); Elena Ferrante (Italian); Herman Koch (Dutch); Nina George (German); and Kyung-sook Shin, the first Korean-language author on the lists in NYT history (though, significantly, not the last). Together, all these authors signal nothing less than a renaissance of translated bestsellers in the US, particularly from 2008 to 2020.

How has such a renaissance gone unnoticed? The answer is that our understanding of the translated international bestseller and its history in the US is enormously incomplete.

To get a better sense of the popularity of translated fiction over time, we turned to the NYT bestseller list, which has tracked bestsellers in the US since 1931. We drew from an existing dataset by Jordan Pruett comprising all hardcover NYT bestsellers in fiction. Bestseller lists like that of the NYT, Pruett explains, are heavily curated based on editorial preferences rather than pure sales metrics. Nevertheless, these lists significantly determine the perception of what constitutes a “bestseller,” and they provide a consistent data source on popular fiction.

We wanted to know how often US bestsellers were originally written in languages other than English. To find out, we compiled information on all 7,431 fiction bestsellers from 1931 to 2020, identifying author nationality, original publication language, and country of publisher for each title. Sorting out those novels originally written in languages other than English enabled us to arrive at a subset of 176 instances in which translated titles hit the NYT bestseller lists. Collectively, they provide a broad overview of trends related to the history of translated bestsellers.

We can gloss these results as such: From 1931 to 2020, just 2.4 percent of the NYT bestseller lists in fiction were in translation, that is, titles originally written in languages other than English. On the surface, that number seems low. In fact, it’s larger than the national average of total works of fiction translated into English, which is less than 1 percent.

A closer look reveals three distinct waves in which the popularity of translated works suddenly rises. Each wave leads to a blossoming of linguistic and generic trends within the market before dissipating rapidly. Between these waves, in the trenches, bestsellers in translation fall to nearly zero.

The first wave began before World War II and crested in the prosperous postwar years. These bestsellers were mainly European titles, especially novels originally written in German, French, Finnish, and Italian, as well as several in Russian. The second wave begins in the 1970s with Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (translated by Gregory Rabassa). This wave largely aligns with what scholars refer to as the “Latin American Boom,” accompanied by several postmodern conspiracy novels by Italian semiotician Umberto Eco (all translated by William Weaver). The second wave is notably diminished compared to the first. Finally, we see the phenomenon described above, in which Nordic noir accounts for part, but not all, of a more recent surge. This third wave still pales in comparison to the first, but it gains more density than the second and in a shorter amount of time. The chart below visualizes these trends.

 

 

US culture is not understood as being particularly cosmopolitan. Other data studies by Matthew Wilkens and Nora Shaalan have documented the “insularity” of US fiction and print culture. Nevertheless, the three waves of translated bestsellers suggest that, despite the persistently low share of published translations in the US, when available resources come together to bring international works to market, readers are eagerly standing by. So what accounts for the dips and dives? Why do translations nearly disappear from NYT lists only to proliferate later?

Analyzing nearly a century of global publishing history is difficult, and much of the complexity falls beyond our scope here. But one thing is certain: the success of translated novels in the US is unstable; so, like a wobbly table, it depends on an ever-changing system of support.

while bestsellers reflect the highest levels of literary mass culture, it’s the support networks built by smaller institutions that make these titles possible.

Take the example of German fiction in wave one: In the aftermath of World War II, German-language literature surged in popularity in the US. Novels like Désirée by Annemarie Selinko, a sweeping historical romance set during the Napoleonic era, and The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel, which tells the story of the miraculous visions of Saint Bernadette Soubirous, offered readers a glimpse into matters of European identity and spirituality after the war. Similarly, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, another work by Werfel, narrated the harrowing tale of Armenian resistance to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, while A Night in Lisbon by Erich Maria Remarque explored the flight of refugees during the Second World War. These books helped shape the American perception of Europe’s postwar reconstruction and the ongoing effects of its recent conflicts.

The business of translations at the time was largely the purview of independent publishing heads and their own idiosyncratic priorities. But this literary influx was steered by a host of institutions committed to promoting European culture in the United States. University presses were crucial in translating German works into English in the postwar era. Cultural exchange programs like the US State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program (which began in the 1940s) helped foster connections between American scholars and German writers. Government initiatives, including the US Information Agency (USIA), promoted cultural diplomacy through literature during the Cold War era. Additionally, private foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation funded many translation projects, ensuring that German works they deemed important reached a wider American audience.

As the immediacy of postwar reconstruction faded, the once-booming market for German translations gradually also declined. This decline coincided with the early restructuring signs of what Dan Sinykin calls the conglomeration era in US publishing. Conglomeration also disrupted national publishing traditions outside the US, though not exactly in the same way. In Germany, conglomeration shifted the focus of publishers to the business of imports, whereas, in the United States, publishing conglomeration prioritized exports.

The results seemed to have been mutually advantageous for publishers from both nations. For example, a major deal in 1969 entailed the merger of Droemer Knaur with four other German publishing houses. The newly merged publishing giant made it “the specialty of the house” to collaborate with US publishers directly, with the aim of identifying US bestsellers for German readers. One publishing journalist termed this the invention of “bestsellerism” in Germany. The emergence of scouting agencies, particularly from Zurich, aided this process. In the 1950s, Lothar Mohrenwitz, Ruth Liepman, and Erich Linder, to name but three of the “pioneers,” all started Swiss scouting agencies that “primarily involved selling English language rights to German publishers.” And in the 1970s, ambitious publishing heads such as Fritz Molden aggressively pursued US bestsellers such as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, offering huge price tags on licensing deals. The tactic eventually led Molden to bankruptcy, but not before he brought half of the top ten NYT bestsellers of the ’70s to Germany, helping incite a craze for US popular culture that his compatriots criticized as the “Amerikanisierung” or the Americanization of German culture. From these examples it’s easy to see why the period in which US novels were more stridently marketed around the world also led to a sharp decline in the number of translated bestsellers in US culture.

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From 1965 to 1970, hardly any works in translation emerged as bestsellers. Then, in 1970, the English translation of Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude made the NYT lists, if only for one week. Nevertheless, it sparked a literary explosion from Latin America that lasted through the 1970s and ’80s. Other titles by the Colombian magical realist, including Love in the Time of Cholera and The General in His Labyrinth were bigger hits. They paved the way for Chilean writer Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune, which transported readers to the Chilean and Californian landscapes during the Gold Rush, and Mexican writer Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, which spent a record 61 weeks on the charts, surpassing the French and German titles of the previous wave. These works, full of multigenerational sagas and social relevance, obviously struck a deep chord with American readers.

This wave was also buoyed by an institutional and literary network, which, this time, brought Latin American voices to the world stage. As Deborah Cohn has explored, the boom was the result of complex negotiations of Cold War nationalism, though writers ultimately benefited from the “increased availability of funding and subsidies from public and private organizations seeking to cultivate positive relations with Latin American artists and intellectuals.” Major private initiatives came from the Ford, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim Foundations and the Center for Inter-American Relations. US government efforts included cultural exchange programs like the Fulbright Program and the USIA, along with support for Latin American writers through the National Endowment for the Arts). Gregory Rabassa, who translated Márquez’s bestsellers into English, has emphasized the professionalization of translation during this era, including the formation of the American Translators Association (ATA) in 1959, the first National Book Award for Translation in 1968, and the establishment of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in 1978. Additionally, a major advocate for translations into English that emerged during the second wave were nonprofit independent presses such as Graywolf (founded in 1974) and Coffee House (founded in 1972), as well as Dalkey Archive (founded in 1984).

Like the first wave, however, the second doesn’t last forever. By the turn of the millennium, bestsellers in translation had once again fallen to zero. Notably, Gisèle Sapiro clarifies how this moment marks the height of globalization in the publishing industry: measured by the rise of English as the target language of literary translations. The hegemony of English, she concluded, severely diminished translations from other languages, including Spanish. Corresponding precisely with the dying out of the second wave, Sapiro’s theory of globalization suggests a second time in which the restructuring of the publishing industry, this time on a global scale, bears immediate consequences for international bestsellers.

This brings us full circle to Larsson and his peers. Following the decline of translations into English (again), it’s not surprising to find a variety of on-the-ground responses since the early 2000s. New efforts by Open Letter Books (founded in 2008), Archipelago Books (founded in 2003), and the Classics division (founded in 1999) of the established New York Review of Books have all renewed efforts to import translations from around the world. Meanwhile, now stalwart independents such as Graywolf and Coffee House continue their missions. Such efforts may account for some of the cultural flourishing that has made the third wave so diverse. The presence of Elena Ferrante on the NYT lists, for example, is an immediate outcome of the establishment of Europa Editions in 2005, whose founding goal was to import English translations from Ferrante’s Italian publisher, Edizioni E/O.

But as Anna Muenchrath shows, one newcomer on the scene with enormous leverage is Amazon Crossing (founded in 2010). Amazon generates its translation cycle based on algorithmic data about user preferences. Not only has Amazon emerged as the largest source of translations into English, Muenchrath discovered, but the corporation now “has a relative monopoly on translations out of” Nordic languages, including Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, Danish, and Icelandic. Consequently, the generic explosion of Nordic noir at the heart of the third wave may be primarily an outcome of a US corporation wresting away the business of translating, publishing, and selling books to American readers from traditional institutions.

This serves as a reminder that while bestsellers reflect the highest levels of literary mass culture, it’s the support networks built by smaller institutions that make these titles possible. By focusing on independent presses, cultural organizations, and translators, we can better understand—and even anticipate—future trends in global literature. In the end, these support structures, though often operating behind the scenes, bear much responsibility for creating the conditions that give rise to the blockbuster international titles that dominate bestseller lists.

At the same time, it’s clear that, beyond even the most strident efforts by cultural ambassadors and advocates for diversity in US publishing, other forces are at work on an enormous, even global scale: conglomeration, globalization, and digital platforms. Where the industry shifts next, even Amazon can’t predict. 

The Edinburgh book festival is to champion the positive power of hope later this summer with events involving Hanif Kureishi, the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish and an exiled Brazilian tribal leader.

The core theme for this year’s festival will be the “expansive” concept of repair, and offering solutions and optimism at a time of crisis and conflict, said Jenny Niven, the event’s director.

“I think it’s an act of hope,” Niven said. “Repair is a positive, optimistic approach, [and] looking at journalism, looking at politics, there are a lot of things that are broken – politically, mental health and wellbeing, societally.

“And rather than leaving people sort of worried, we’re hoping that we can present new writers and thinkers who offer solutions and new ideas and great analysis that moves the conversation forward.”

That strand will begin with an opening gala featuring new commissions from Darwish, Juma Xipaia, a Brazilian Indiginous leader forced into exile after she challenged government corruption, and others such as Jenni Fagan and Amitav Ghosh. Kureishi, who had a catastrophic fall that left him paralysed, will appear online with a “very personal perspective on repair”.

Niven said she was also striving to broaden the festival’s appeal, both to increase its audience but also to much more accurately reflect what people read.

That includes putting on the former Scotland footballer turned pundit Ally McCoist with his new autobiography Dear Scotland, and the Gavin and Stacey writer and co-star Ruth Jones, who will take part in the festival’s “Front List” strand of celebrity writers at the 1,000-seat capacity McEwan Hall.

Nicola Sturgeon, the former first minister, will discuss her new memoir Frankly with Kirsty Wark, originally billed as the book’s launch event, though Sturgeon has since added in several talks earlier in the week, beginning with an event in Manchester.

Among the 700 events in this year’s edition of the festival, which before the Covid crisis laid claim to be the world’s largest literature festival, will be a greatly expanded series of cookery shows, after the few it staged last year “went gangbusters”, Niven said.

There will be seven cookery demonstrations at a cookery school featuring chefs such as Sabrina Ghayour offering Persian cuisine, lunch with Rosie Kellett and Spanish cookery with José Pizarro, where the audience will eat the meals they make.

Tickets will be sought after: there will be 44 tickets for each, with several three-hour-long cookery events costing up to £100 a head – among the most expensive tickets of all the festivals this year.

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With the book festival now in a new and unfamiliar home on the south side of Edinburgh, in an extensively remodelled Victorian hospital now part of Edinburgh University, Niven is attempting to refashion its approach.

Music, book-binding workshops and a dedicated young adult series have become mainstream events, as have more theatrical productions and specific subject themes to “cut through all the festival noise”.

Chief among those will be a recreation of the Scotch sitting room devised by the anarchic Scottish poet and writer Ivor Cutler featuring Hamish Hawk, who will present stories from his childhood and reworkings of Cutler’s work, accompanied by Cutler’s original harmonium.

On the festival’s final day the Hollywood stars Viggo Mortensen and Vanessa Redgrave will feature among a cast of celebrity speakers on stage reading from The People Speak, an anthology of famous speeches and polemics from around the world, drawn from a collection collated by the historians Anthony Arnove and Howard Zinn.

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, has won this year’s International Booker prize for translated fiction, becoming the first short story collection to take the award. The stories were originally written in Kannada, the official language of the state of Karnataka in southern India.

Described by the author and chair of judges Max Porter as “something genuinely new for English readers: a radical translation” of “beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories”, Heart Lamp’s 12 tales chronicle the lives of women in patriarchal communities in southern India. They were selected as well as translated by Bhasthi, the first Indian translator to win the award. She chose them from around 50 stories in six collections written by Mushtaq over a 30-year-period.

The £50,000 prize – shared equally between writer and translator – was presented at the Tate Modern in London on Tuesday evening, where a video of actor Ambika Mod reading from the winning title was also shown.

Writing about the shortlist in the Guardian, John Self said Mushtaq and Bhasthi’s “wonderful collection” would be a “worthy winner”. The tone of the book “varies from quiet to comic, but the vision is consistent”, he wrote.

Porter said he and his fellow judges – poet Caleb Femi, writer and Guardian critic Sana Goyal, author and translator Anton Hur and musician Beth Orton – spent six hours deliberating, during which they “argued a lot” before “unanimously” deciding the winner.

Though Porter said they were looking for the “best book” above all else, he called Heart Lamp a “really special book in terms of its politics”. The stories “contain the feminism for which [Mushtaq] is known. And they contain extraordinary accounts of patriarchal systems and resistance,” he added. “But they aren’t activist stories. First and foremost they’re beautiful accounts of everyday life and particularly the lives of women.”

Porter also praised Bhasthi’s translation, which he said “celebrates the movement from one language to another. It contains a multiplicity of Englishes. It is a translation with a texture.”

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“When one translates, the aim is to introduce the reader to new words,” Bhasthi said in an interview with Scroll.in earlier this year. “I call it translating with an accent, which reminds the reader that they are reading a work set in another culture, without exoticising it, of course. So the English in Heart Lamp is an English with a very deliberate Kannada hum to it.”

The other books shortlisted for the prize were On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland; Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson; Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda; Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes; and A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson.

Last year’s winner was Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann. Previous winners include Olga Tokarczuk and translator Jennifer Croft, Lucas Rijneveld and translator Michele Hutchison and Han Kang and translator Deborah Smith.

Hiromi Kawakami and Solvej Balle have made this year’s International Booker prize shortlist, which for the first time is comprised entirely of books published by independent presses.

British translator Sophie Hughes has been shortlisted for her translation of Perfection, originally written in Italian by Vincenzo Latronico. This marks the third time Hughes has been shortlisted for the prize, making her the award’s record holder for the most times shortlisted and longlisted.

Quick Guide

The International Booker prize 2025 shortlist

Show

On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland (Faber)

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson (Small Axes)

Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda (Granta)

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo)

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi (And Other Stories)

A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson (Lolli)

Six author-translator teams are now in contention for the £50,000 prize, the winner of which will be announced on 20 May, with the prize money divided equally between author and translator.

Japanese writer Kawakami, best known for her novel Strange Weather in Tokyo, has been shortlisted for her novel-in-stories Under the Eye of the Big Bird, translated by Asa Yoneda. Danish writer Balle and Scottish translator Barbara J Haveland have been chosen for On the Calculation of Volume I, the first of a planned septology in which the protagonist Tara is stuck in a time loop.

“These mind-expanding books ask what might be in store for us, or how we might mourn, worship or survive”, said author and judging chair Max Porter. “They offer knotty, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes radically hopeful answers to these questions. Taken together they build a miraculous lens through which to view human experience, both the truly disturbing and the achingly beautiful.”

The shortlisted titles are slim, with four coming in at under 200 pages, including Latronico’s Perfection. The novel, about a millennial expat couple living in Berlin, “transcends its satire of 2010s hipsterdom through the depth of Latronico’s sociological observations”, writes Thomas McMullan in the Guardian. “This chronicle of contemporary Berlin is strongest in its articulation of how a certain kind of globalisation dislocates us from our surroundings.”

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson, was also selected. The book was written in three weeks, and is based on recordings from a real event in November 2021, when a dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsized in the Channel, causing the death of 27 people on board.

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A book translated from Kannada – a language spoken by tens of millions of people, primarily in the state of Karnataka in southwest India – features on the shortlist for the first time in the prize’s history this year: Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. It contains 12 stories originally published between 1990 and 2023, which capture the daily lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India.

Completing the shortlist is A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson. Serre wrote the book, about a woman with severe psychological disorders, in six months after the suicide of her sister. “I wanted to create a memorial to her”, said Serre.

The other titles longlisted for this year’s prize were The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan Antoon; There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem, translated by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert; Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter; Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary; Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton; Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles; and On a Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer, translated by Lucy Scott.

Alongside Porter on this year’s judging panel are the poet Caleb Femi, writer and Guardian critic Sana Goyal, author and translator Anton Hur, and musician Beth Orton.

Authors who have previously won the award include Han Kang, Olga Tokarczuk and Lucas Rijneveld. Last year, Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann won the prize for Kairos.

To explore all of the books on the shortlist for the International Booker prize 2025 visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.