International Booker 2026 shortlist: Indian-origin translator Padma Viswanathan in running
Padma Viswanathan, a Canadian-American translator of Indian origin, is among the six finalists for the £50,000 prize, which celebrates the best fiction in translation.
The 2026 International Booker Prize shortlist comprises six books covering roughly a century of difficult history, moving from 1930s Taiwan to post-revolution Iran, from the Albanian Alps to the suburbs of Paris, each stopping somewhere power has left its mark.
The finalists include Ana Paula Maia’s dystopian Brazilian novel On Earth As It Is Beneath, translated from the Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan, a Canadian-American writer and professor of Indian origin. Maia’s 2025 novella is set on a penal colony where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered.
In an exclusive interview with The Indian Expressfollowing the longlist announcement, Viswanathan revealed that the translation took nine weeks, five drafts. “For the third draft, I retyped the entire manuscript from start to finish over just a few days, aware that Ana Paula seemed to employ a sort of freewheeling association with her relatively curt language.”
In addition to On Earth As It Is Beneath, the finalists are:
📌 The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated from the German by Ruth Martin. A polyphonic novel tracing an Iranian family’s journey from revolution to exile in Germany, it was praised by the judges as “timely, tender, political and wonderfully human.”
📌 She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel. Set in the Albanian Alps, this novel follows a teenager who becomes a “sworn virgin”—renouncing her womanhood to escape an arranged marriage—in a story the judges called “exquisitely written, brilliantly observed.”
📌 The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin. A darkly comic exploration of complicity under Nazism, the novel centers on the real-life filmmaker GW Pabst, who returned from Hollywood to work in Hitler’s Germany. Kehlmann and Benjamin were previously shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020.
📌The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump. First published in France three decades ago, this novel about a suburban witch whose twin daughters surpass her powers is finally appearing in English. NDiaye and Stump were longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2016.
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📌Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King. Framed as a translated memoir, this novel follows a Japanese novelist’s culinary tour of 1930s Taiwan, exploring colonialism, queer love, and the complexity of Taiwanese memory under Japanese rule. The English translation won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024.
The International Booker Prize recognises the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 May 2025 and 30 April 2026.
The centrality of translation to the prize’s mission is evident as the award money worth £50,000 (around 61 lakh) is divided equally between the winning author and translator.
The winner will be announced on May 19 at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London.
Aishwarya Khosla is a senior editorial figure at The Indian Express, where she spearheads the digital strategy and execution for the Books & Literature and Puzzles & Games sections. With over eight years of experience in high-stakes journalism, Aishwarya specializes in literary criticism, cultural commentary, and long-form features that explore the complex intersection of identity, politics, and social change.
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On Earth As It Is Beneath © India Hobson for Booker Prize Foundation
