Heart Lamp, then Taiwan Travelogue: This not-for-profit published back-to-back International Booker winners

The fact that a small not-for-profit publisher running out of a library in Sheffield won the prize rather than major London-based publishers is no small feat. Since the award took its current form in 2016, the publishers of the previous winners have included major imprints and storied Independent publishers including Portobello Books, Jonathan Cape, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Sandstone Press, Faber & Faber, Pushkin Press, Tilted Axis Press, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Granta. Of those, Fitzcarraldo Editions has been longlisted 17 times, only winning in 2018 when Olga Tokarczuk won the International Booker for Flights.

Translators’ names on the cover

Frustrated that good books were not being translated into English, Stefan Tobler, a translator himself, founded And Other Stories in 2009. The press pays its translators above industry norms and, makes it a point to put their names on the front cover, something many publishers avoid.

In her acceptance speech, translator Lin King revealed that there had been a long gap between the publication of the Taiwan Travelogue in the US and UK because no British publisher was willing to put the translator’s name on the cover. “Not until And Other Stories came to the rescue,” she said. Graywolf Press published the book in the USA in April, 2024.

A not-for-profit organisation

A screengrab of the congratulatory post by publisher, And Other Stories. (Instagram/@andotherpics)

The press is structured as a Community Interest Company, a legal form of not-for-profit in which no profits are ever paid out to owners and, crucially, the company cannot be acquired by a larger commercial entity whose objectives are profit-driven. This structural protection has allowed it to make publishing decisions based solely on what the team believes is good writing.

It funds itself partly through a subscriber model in which readers pay in advance to support books before they are published, and it uses foreign-language reading groups to identify titles worth acquiring, opening editorial decisions to a wider circle than most publishing houses would consider practical.

In 2017, the press moved its main office from the South-East of England to Sheffield, setting up in the Central Library on Surrey Street. “We think more of the English publishing industry should move out of London, Oxford and their environs,” Tobler wrote in the Guardian.

The story behind Heart Lamp

Tara Tobler, the press’s senior fiction editor, backed the acquisition of Heart Lamp by Karnataka-based activist Banu Mushtaq, who had been publishing short stories since the 1970s, but had never before appeared in book-length English translation. Deepa Bhasthi changed that, and translated 12 stories from Mushtaq’s six Kannada collections. She called her process “translating with an accent.”

The rest, as they say, is history. Heart Lamp became the first short story collection to win the prize, the first Kannada-language work to be shortlisted, and Deepa Bhasthi became the first Indian translator to take home the award.

Taiwan Travelogue also has its own set of firsts, including Shuāng-zǐ being the first Taiwanese author to win the prize. The book had won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the US in 2024, before it became a finalist for the 2026 International Booker.

The novel is set in Japanese colonial-era Taiwan and is formally demanding as King’s English translation contains footnotes, forewords, afterwords and three separate systems of pronunciation for the same written characters. King acknowledged in her acceptance speech that she expected the book to find a small and niche readership. “The English Taiwan Travelogue demands much attention and work from the reader precisely because it refuses to simplify Taiwan’s multilingual, multicultural and multi-ethnic reality,” she said.

To qualify for The International Booker Prize an English translation of a work of long-form fiction should have been published in the UK and/or Ireland between May 1 2025 and April 30, 2026.

“No book should bear the burden of speaking on behalf of the whole country,” King said in her acceptance speech. “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. Because we are not a chorus but a cacophony, self-contradicting and unruly, just like any healthy, robust democracy.”

For And Other Stories, the double win has confirmed that the books bigger publishers consider too risky, political, formally unusual or rooted in languages without large English readerships are also books worth publishing.

The 2026 British Book Awards named it Small Press of the Year, the judges praising not only the prize wins but the press’s “hard-wired commitment to diversity with real, quantifiable and trackable pledges.”

In the most memorable moment of her acceptance speech, Lin King reached for a domestic metaphor to make her argument about translation’s place in the industry. In the US, she observed, orange juice comes labelled as “no pulp” or “with pulp.” Here in the UK, it is “smooth” or “with juicy bits.” She hoped, she said, that publishers and readers would begin thinking of translation “not as the pulp, but as the juicy bits — and proudly labelling it so on the carton.”

And Other Stories has been labelling it that way since 2009.