The International Booker Prize 2026 will be awarded Tuesday, May 19, at Tate Modern in London, with the announcement livestreamed from 10:05 p.m. BST on the Booker Prizes' YouTube, Instagram and TikTok channels. [1] The £50,000 purse is split equally between the winning author and the winning translator. Each of the six shortlisted titles has already received £5,000. The shortlist was chosen by a five-person jury chaired by Natasha Brown, joined by Marcus du Sautoy, Sophie Hughes, Troy Onyango and Nilanjana S. Roy, from a 128-book submission pool and a 13-book longlist announced February 24. [2]

The six finalists. The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated from German by Ruth Martin (Scribe). She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel (Sandorf Passage). The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin (Summit). On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan (Charco). The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump (Vintage). Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King (Graywolf). [3] Five of the six authors and four of the six translators are women. The shortlist is the first to include a Taiwanese writer.

Three of the six novels excavate a specific historical inflection point: imperial-Japan-controlled Taiwan in the 1930s (Taiwan Travelogue), Nazi-era Germany and the film industry under Goebbels (The Director), and the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the four decades that followed (The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran). Kehlmann's The Director — about the Austrian film director G.W. Pabst working under the Third Reich — sits in particularly strange relation to the Cannes politics of the same week. NDiaye's The Witch, the only previously-translated Goncourt-laureate on the list, brings magical realism back to a 1990s French suburb. Bazyar and Karabash are debut novelists on the international stage; Yáng's Taiwan Travelogue already won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature. [4] Whoever wins on Tuesday, the prize architecture has produced a six-stop tour of where world fiction has been doing its serious work.

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin