16th May 2025
The International Booker Prize 2025 judging panel, from left to right: Anton Hur, Beth Orton, Caleb Femi, Max Porter and Sana Goyal Feature
Found in translation: the International Booker Prize restores faith in literature
As the International Booker Prize’s second incarnation reaches its 10th year, judges Max Porter and Sana Goyal argue that literary translation is needed now more than ever
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iction in translation is flying. The past year has seen hits galore – led by Asako Yuzuki’s Polly Barton-translated Nibbie champ Butter (Fourth Estate) – along with
a robust Manga sector, the ever-expanding Japanese and Korean cosy fantasy trend and a mighty boost from BookTok, which has propelled deep backlist (Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz) and classics (Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights, in the Penguin Classics-published Ronald Meyer
version) up the charts. All told, roughly £1 in every £8 spent through NielsenIQ BookScan’s Fiction category over the past year has been on a translated title, almost certainly at least double where the market was nine years ago. I mention nine years gone as a point of comparison because that is when the International Booker Prize changed its model from a biennial full-career mini-Nobel to an annual single-title award for a book in English originally published in another language, which equally recognised author and translator. Translated fiction has risen ever since. There are many reasons for that rise and not
just because of the change in the prize. And perhaps it is not even solely down to just the book world because there are wider cultural issues at play. One might argue that anime- streaming platforms like Crunchyroll have done as much to boost the Manga market (Manga accounts for over 50% of the UK’s translated fiction sales) as retailers embracing the genre. Or that the roaring success of Squid Game, Parasite and BTS have helped feed into the appetite for Korean literature. But the International Booker Prize has set the bar and become a conversation-starter (particularly around translator recognition), and its sales
Feature
International Booker Prize 2025
NEO GILDER FOR BOOKER PRIZE FOUNDATION
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