International Booker Prize nominees: 13 books to get you talking

LONDON – A novel about a director making movies under Nazi rule. A tale of a war veteran with amnesia, who is unsure whether his wife is who she says she is. And a book about an unexceptional witch.

These titles are among the 13 books nominated for 2026’s International Booker Prize, the prestigious award for fiction translated into English.

Natasha Brown, a British author who is chairing the judging panel in 2026, said in a news statement on Feb 24 that many of the 128 books considered for the prize in 2026 had examined the consequences of war.

Although that topic is the focus of some of the 13 titles that made the cut, Brown said they also featured “petty squabbles between neighbours, mysterious mountain villages, Big Pharma conspiracies, witchy women, ill-fated lovers, a haunted prison and obscure film references”.

The selected books were originally written in 11 languages, including Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish and Swedish. Some are new titles, although one nominee, Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men, was originally published in Persian in 1989, and Penguin is publishing an English translation in 2026.

Perhaps the highest-profile nominee is Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director, translated from the original German by Ross Benjamin, about the largely forgotten 20th-century Austrian film-maker G.W. Pabst, who finds himself compromising his artistic principles while stuck in his Nazi-controlled homeland.

The Director was one of The New York Times’ 10 best books of 2025, and J. Hoberman, reviewing it for the Times, called the novel “a marvellous performance – not only supple, horrifying and mordantly droll, but fluidly translated and absolutely convincing”.

The nominees also include two past winners of United States’ National Book Award for translated literature: We Are Green And Trembling by Gabriela Cabezon Camara, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers and inspired by the life of a female 17th-century explorer who lived as a man; and Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi, translated from Chinese by Lin King, about a Japanese author travelling in 1930s occupied Taiwan.

Also nominated is Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken, about an ancient witch trial, a novel that British critics have raved about; and Marie NDiaye’s highly anticipated The Witch, translated from French by Jordan Stump, about a witch trapped in a bad marriage.

Established in 2005, the International Booker Prize was originally awarded to an author for an entire body of work. But since 2016, it has gone to a single book translated into English and published in Britain or Ireland during the previous 12 months. The award comes with £50,000 (S$85,500), which the author and translator share equally.

The prize in 2025 went to Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi – the first story collection to win the honour. Other past winners have included Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort Of Evening.

The judging panel in 2026 will now cut the nominees down to a six-book shortlist, which is scheduled to be announced on March 31. The judges then re-read all of the shortlisted titles before deciding on a winner, which will be announced at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London on May 19. NYTIMES

The 13 nominees: