International Booker Prize 2025: a restoration of faith in world literature

Fiction 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 fillip to shortlistees and winners has been substantial.

Two of this year’s judges of the prize – which will be awarded on 20th May – are familiar with it from the other side of the coin. Chair Max Porter, in his previous life as a Granta editor before becoming an award-winning and bestselling novelist, brought the first winner under the new rules (Han Kang and Deborah Smith’s The Vegetarian) to market. Editor and publishing director of literary magazine Wasafiri, Sana Goyal, was a key player at translation specialist Tilted Axis Press – founded by Smith – although Goyal had already left when Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell’s Tomb of Sand won the gong for the indie publisher in 2022.  

Goyal points out that an indicator of the robust fiction-in-translation market is not just sales figures, but also the sheer scale of submissions – the judging panel had to consider 154 books, a prize record. “It is very obvious to me that independents are doing most of the translation risk-taking and a lot of the heavy lifting, which was reflected in our long and shortlists.” Indies made up 11 of the 12 longlistees and ran the table on the shortlist. Historically, conglomerates have won just two of the previous nine prizes.

We are in a catastrophically divided moment with borders – digital and literal ones – being erected between human beings

Goyal adds: “Sure, the larger publishing ecology feels healthy, but the arts funding landscape is a real shitshow – there is no money for these risk-takers. That’s a problem because these independents can be unfazed by trends – and are able to do the work year after year. I’m wary about larger publishers who sometimes come in and publish books from a particular region off the back of some global news.”

Porter picks up the thread: “It had to be pointed out when we made the longlist that they were nearly all indies. We hadn’t noticed because we were so in the books. So the question of the list’s make-up came later from the publishing world. Which maybe shows how long I have been out of the publishing game, because 10 years ago I would have known, even before I picked the books up, who acquired them and who agented them. I didn’t know who those people were – I still don’t – and am grateful for that.”

There is not a clear line to weave through the 2025 shortlist as the sextet is varied, ranging from Danish writer Solvej Balle’s first in a speculative septology, On the Calculation of Volume I (translated by Barbara J Haveland), to French author Anne Serre’s moving look at psychological disorder, A Leopard-Skin Hat (translated by Mark Hutchinson), to Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq’s collection of a dozen stories of the lives of Muslim girls and women in Southern India (from the Kannadan, translated by Deepa Bhasthi). But if there is a rough, overlapping commonality, it is a reaction to late-stage capitalism: Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, a Berlin-set dissection of modern life (from the Italian by thrice-shortlisted translator Sophie Hughes), Hiromi Kawakami’s dystopian AI cautionary tale Under the Eye of the Big Bird (translated by Asa Yoneda), and Vincent Delecroix’s (  1) searing migrant story Small Boat (translated by Helen Stevenson).

All the books are short, though – the longest is 278 pages, with four being under 200 pages. Perfection and Small Boat are a whisker over 100. Porter’s own novels are famously slim. “This is the perfect place to break the news that I set out on a mission to get rid of anything over 200 pages,” Porter says drolly. “I don’t think this is heralding a new trend, and we had longer books on the longlist, but maybe there is something in the economics of translation publishing that might mean you would be more likely to put your money on [a shorter book] than [Olga Tokarczuk’s 928-page] The Books of Jacob.”

While the judges have been “in the books”, they do have an eye on the bigger picture. This is something of an occupational hazard for Goyal as her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies was on literary prizes. She says: “Because prizes can hold so much prestige and canonical value, it is important to think about what the power of that can be within the industry. Particularly with the older awards, we need to think about remodelling and reinvention to keep them moving with the times.”

It is not lost on the panel that they are judging a prize for translation at a time when cross-cultural exchange is sorely needed. Porter says: “We are in a catastrophically divided moment with borders – digital and literal ones – being erected between human beings. Languages and ideas need to flow through, over and around the borders… We are now at a point, here and elsewhere, when what we would have deemed xenophobic or bigoted language is the pure mainstream, state-owned, sanctioned, media-produced norm. So for those that want to say ‘not in our name’, literature can be a crucial weapon in our arsenal, to use a repellent military metaphor.

“But I don’t know what one does about the fact that what means so much to us – literature, communities – means so little to those who are, shall we say, our enemies. They view it as pure irrelevance. But I look to history to vindicate our faith in literature. These things survive and have an impact on the way we understand ourselves and communicate with one another. So I have faith in literature, when I have very little faith in anything else at the moment.”