Reading List · Literary Prizes
Since 2016 the International Booker has gone every year to one book of fiction translated into English, and the money is split down the middle between the writer and the translator. Eleven books so far, from eleven different languages: Korean, Hebrew, Polish, Arabic, Dutch, French, Hindi, Bulgarian, German, Kannada and, this year, Mandarin Chinese. From 2027 the prize doubles to £100,000 and takes a new name.
By Lisanne Swart · 11 winners since 2016 · Fiction in translation · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 22 September 2026
Click a title to read about that book further down ↓
The 2027 prize is the first under its new name, the Bukhman International Booker Prize, and the first worth £100,000. It is open to books translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland between 1 May 2026 and 30 April 2027. The chair of the judges is the novelist Katie Kitamura.
Quick answer
The International Booker Prize is a British prize for fiction translated into English. Since 2016 it has gone every year to one novel or collection of stories published in the UK or Ireland, and the prize money is shared equally between the author and the translator. There have been eleven winners. The latest is Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, announced on 19 May 2026. From 2027 it is called the Bukhman International Booker Prize and is worth £100,000.
How this page chooses
This page has every winner since the prize became a yearly award for a single book, so there is nothing to choose between: the timeline at the top shows all eleven with the language each was written in, and every title has its own entry further down, in the same order.
Each entry names the translator as well as the author, because the prize does. Under each book is one line of plain fact, and nothing that cannot be checked.
Oldest first, one for each year. The line in red is a fact about the book, its author or its translator, not an opinion about it.
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Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith
After a dream, Yeong-hye, an ordinary married woman in Seoul, stops eating meat. Her husband, her father, her brother-in-law and her sister each try to deal with what she is becoming, in three parts told by the people around her and never by her.
Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.
Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen
Dovaleh G, a stand-up comedian past his prime, does a show in a small club in Netanya. Over one evening the act turns into a confession about a choice he was forced to make as a boy, watched by a retired judge who knew him then.
Grossman was the first Israeli writer to win the prize.
Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft
A book of travel in more than a hundred pieces, long and short: a narrator always on the move, anatomists and their specimens, a man whose wife and child vanish on a Croatian island, and Chopin’s heart carried home to Warsaw by his sister.
Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, announced in 2019.
Translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth
Three sisters in the Omani village of al-Awafi: Mayya, who marries after a broken heart, Asma, who marries out of duty, and Khawla, who waits for a man who has left for Canada. Around them, over several generations, Oman changes from a society that still kept slaves into a modern state.
The first book written in Arabic to win the prize.
Translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison
Jas is ten and lives on a dairy farm in a strict Reformed family. When her brother drowns while skating, the family stops talking about anything, and Jas, left alone with her questions, retreats into fantasies that grow stranger and more disturbing.
Rijneveld was the youngest winner at the time. The Dutch title is De avond is ongemak.
Translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis
Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in the First World War, cannot bring himself to end the suffering of his dying friend Mademba when he is begged to. Afterwards he goes out alone into no man’s land at night, and comes back each time with a trophy.
In French, as Frère d’âme, it won the Prix Goncourt des lycéens in 2018.
Translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell
An eighty-year-old woman in northern India takes to her bed after her husband dies and lies with her back to the family. When she gets up again, it is to travel with her daughter to Pakistan, to face what happened to her at Partition.
The first book translated from Hindi to win the prize.
Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel
Gaustine opens a “clinic for the past” in Zurich for people with Alzheimer’s, each floor furnished as a different decade. Soon healthy people want to move in too, and then whole countries vote on which decade they would like to live in.
The first Bulgarian novel to win the prize.
Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann
Katharina, nineteen, meets Hans, a married writer in his fifties, by chance on a bus in East Berlin in 1986. Their affair grows possessive and cruel in the same years as the country around them comes to an end.
Erpenbeck was the first German writer to win the prize, and Hofmann the first male translator.
Translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi
Twelve stories about women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India: marriages, mothers, daughters, mosques and the men who run them, told with what the judges called wit and emotional depth.
The first collection of short stories to win the prize.
Translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King
Presented as the translation of a rediscovered Japanese travel memoir: a Japanese novelist with an enormous appetite tours Japanese-ruled Taiwan in the 1930s with a Taiwanese interpreter, Chizuru, who loves food as much as she does. It is a romance between the two women and a novel about who holds the power between them.
The first book translated from Mandarin Chinese to win. It also won the US National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024.
The prize began in 2005 as the Man Booker International Prize, and for its first ten years it was something else entirely: every two years it went to a living writer for a whole body of work, in any language, English included. The six winners were Ismail Kadare (2005), Chinua Achebe (2007), Alice Munro (2009), Philip Roth (2011), Lydia Davis (2013) and László Krasznahorkai (2015).
Two of those six went on to win the Nobel Prize: Munro in 2013 and Krasznahorkai in 2025. In 2016 the prize was rebuilt as a mirror image of the Booker: one book a year, but only books translated into English.
Since 2016 the money has been split equally between author and translator, and from 2027 the prize is £100,000, so each of them receives £50,000.
The new money comes from Bukhman Philanthropies, which has committed to funding the prize for ten years. From 2027 it is called the Bukhman International Booker Prize; the English-language prize keeps its name, the Booker Prize.
A British prize for fiction translated into English. Since 2016 it has gone every year to one novel or collection of stories published in the UK or Ireland, with the money shared equally between the author and the translator.
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, announced on 19 May 2026 at Tate Modern in London.
£50,000 up to and including 2026, shared equally between author and translator. From the 2027 prize it is £100,000, so £50,000 each, and every shortlisted book receives £5,000.
Bukhman Philanthropies has committed to funding the prize for the next ten years. The 2027 award is the first under the new name.
The Booker Prize is for a novel written in English. The International Booker is for fiction translated into English from any other language, and short-story collections are eligible too. Both are for books published in the UK or Ireland.
From 2005 to 2015 it was given every two years for a body of work: Ismail Kadare, Chinua Achebe, Alice Munro, Philip Roth, Lydia Davis and László Krasznahorkai.
The longlist on 16 March 2027, the shortlist on 15 April 2027 and the winner in May 2027.
Yes. The Discomfort of Evening (De avond is ongemak) by Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison, won in 2020.
Winner list and 2027 dates last verified 22 September 2026.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Can love overcome a power imbalance? Taiwan Travelogue, winner of the International Booker Prize 2026, teases out the nuances of this question against a backdrop of 1930s Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule.”
— Natasha Brown, chair of the 2026 judges
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