Marie NDiaye on Booker shortlist

Marie NDiaye’s *The Witch* is now one of six books on the 2026 International Booker Prize shortlist. (thebookerprizes.com) The shortlist was announced on March 31, 2026, by a judging panel chaired by novelist Natasha Brown. The prize honors fiction translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland between May 1, 2025, and April 30, 2026. (thebookerprizes.com) NDiaye’s novel was written in French and translated into English by Jordan Stump, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor who has translated about 30 books, including several by NDiaye. The Booker Prize Foundation lists *The Witch* as a French-language novel about Lucie, a suburban mother trying to pass magical powers to her twin daughters. (modlang.unl.edu; thebookerprizes.com) The book’s path to this shortlist is unusually long. The Booker Prize Foundation said *The Witch* was first published in French in 1996, creating a 30-year gap between its original publication and this International Booker recognition. (thebookerprizes.com) That timing fits the prize’s rules, which focus on when a work appears in English in the United Kingdom or Ireland, not when it first appeared in its original language. This year’s six-book shortlist was chosen from 128 submissions and a 13-book longlist announced on February 24, 2026. (thebookerprizes.com) NDiaye is already one of France’s most decorated living writers. She won the Prix Goncourt in 2009 for *Three Strong Women*, and she published her first novel at 17. (radiofrance.fr; theparisreview.org) The 2026 shortlist also underlines how much the prize centers translators alongside authors. The £50,000 award is split equally between the winning author and translator, and each shortlisted title receives £2,500 for the author and £2,500 for the translator. (thebookerprizes.com; lithub.com) In remarks published by the Booker Prize Foundation, NDiaye said that when she wrote the novel “years ago,” people rarely talked about witches outside childhood fairy tales. Stump said the book blends “the banal with the magical,” a combination that has become central to how readers are now meeting it in English. (thebookerprizes.com) The winner will be announced on May 19, 2026, at Tate Modern in London. Until then, *The Witch* sits on a shortlist that has turned a 1996 French novel into one of this spring’s most closely watched translated books. (publishersweekly.com; lithub.com)