International Booker Prize at 10: How it became the face of literature in translation

One of the world’s most influential awards for fiction in English translation, the International Booker Prize, that marks a decade in its current form, has worked to reward the faith — and courage — of writers who write against the grain of the global literary market, of translators who carry their vision across the impossible distance of languages, and of readers who refuse to be circumscribed by familiarity and comfort.

The long road to reinvention


Launched first in 2005 as the Man Booker International Prize, it was a biennial honour awarded to a writer for their entire body of work. Its early recipients, Ismail Kadare, Chinua Achebe, Alice Munro, Philip Roth and László Krasznahorkai, were already literary behemoths and the Prize only served to confirm their stature.

When the original Booker Prize expanded its eligibility in 2015 to admit writers of any nationality writing in English and published in the UK — it was earlier open only to writers from the Commonwealth, Zimbabwe and Ireland — the International Prize, too, changed purpose. It committed for the first time to fiction that had crossed over from another language into English. It also became an annual award for a single work of fiction, written in any language other than English, but available in translation to English-speaking readers.

Why it matters


This change made room for a long-overdue transformation: the £50,000 prize would be shared equally between author and translator. It acknowledged, formally, that translation is not a mechanical service but a creative act. The translator, for long the invisible figure in world literature, was finally given a seat at the table. Before that, their names would often be missing from the book jacket. The first winner under the new rules was Han Kang’s unsettling and luminous The Vegetarian, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith. In the decade since, the Prize has honoured works from Arabic, Dutch, Polish, Bulgarian, Kannada and more. Last year, Indian writer Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi won the award for the collection of short stories, Heart Lamp. In 2022, Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell won for Tomb of Sand.

What does a decade of winners reveal?


The International Booker Prize has also worn politics on its sleeves, showing a preference for fiction that grapples with the weight of history — Olga Tokarczuk’s associative, nomadic Flights (2018); Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies (2019), a tapestry of Omani life across generations; David Diop’s At Night All Blood Is Black (2021), a harrowing meditation on colonial violence. It has championed formally daring, structurally restless books that refuse to give in to the demands of the market, that reflect some of the world’s anxieties — war, displacement, memory, gender and the weight of the past.

The Nobel connection


No measure of the Prize’s impact is more striking than the fact that four authors recognised by the International Booker Prize have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature: Kang, Tokarczuk. Annie Ernaux and Jon Fosse.

The global indie publishing boom

Since 2016, sales of translated fiction in the UK have doubled. Independent publishers, those risk-taking imprints guided by passion and a growing appetite for world literature, form the bulwark of the Prize by consistently drawing attention to fiction from languages and literary cultures often marginal to mainstream Anglophone publishing: In 2025, all six books on the shortlist were published by independent publishers. Sheffield-based And Other Stories, which published Taiwan Travelogue, had also published last year’s winner, Heart Lamp.