International Booker date set
The winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize will be announced on May 19 at Tate Modern in London, organizers confirmed in recent coverage (deadline.com). The shortlist is made up of six novels from six countries and has been packaged this year with short films inspired by each title (deadline.com).
The 2026 International Booker Prize winner will be announced on May 19 at Tate Modern in London. (thebookerprizes.com) Organizers announced the six-book shortlist on March 31 after judges reviewed 128 submitted titles. 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) The winner receives £50,000, split equally between the author and translator, and each shortlisted book gets £5,000, also divided evenly. The 2026 judging panel is chaired by novelist Natasha Brown and includes translator Sophie Hughes, writer Troy Onyango, novelist Nilanjana S. Roy and mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. (thebookerprizes.com) The International Booker has used its current format since 2016, when it shifted to honoring a single book in translation rather than a body of work. The Booker Prize Foundation says 2026 marks 10 years of the award in that form. (thebookerprizes.com) This year’s shortlist spans six books translated from five original languages, with authors and translators representing eight nationalities across four continents. Five of the six authors and four of the six translators are women. (thebookerprizes.com) The shortlisted books are *The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran* by Shida Bazyar, translated by Ruth Martin; *She Who Remains* by Rene Karabash, translated by Izidora Angel; and *The Director* by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin. The other finalists are *On Earth As It Is Beneath* by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Padma Viswanathan; *The Witch* by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump; and *Taiwan Travelogue* by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King. (thebookerprizes.com) The books move across settings that include 1930s Taiwan under Japanese rule, Nazi-controlled Europe, suburban France in the 1990s, a prison colony in Brazil, the Albanian Alps and the aftermath of Iran’s 1979 revolution. The Booker Prize site says the list includes two debut novels and one previously shortlisted author-translator pairing. (thebookerprizes.com) The foundation is also releasing six short films tied to the shortlist on April 16. Actors including Toby Jones, Indira Varma, Toheeb Jimoh, Kae Alexander, Jehnny Beth and Xelia Mendes-Jones perform extracts from the nominated books. (thebookerprizes.com) Those films will be screened again at a 10th-anniversary International Booker event at the Southbank Centre on May 8, ahead of the May 19 winner announcement. The Booker Prize Foundation said the readings event for shortlisted authors and translators is scheduled for May 15 in Bristol. (thebookerprizes.com)
