On Tuesday, February 24th the International Booker Prize Longlist was announced. From 128 fiction titles, 13 were chosen and will be further narrowed down in March for the Shortlist. The list includes only fiction translated into English, featuring original languages such as Mandarin, Danish, German and Spanish.
Many nominated titles deal with the topic of female empowerment and feminism, notably Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur (translated from Persian), The Witch by Maria NDiaye (translated from French), and She Who Remains by Rene Karabash (translated from Bulgarian). Themes of queerness and gender as well as repression are discussed in Yang Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue (translated from Mandarin), Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s We are Green and Trembling (translated from Spanish) and Shida Bayzar’s The Nights Are Quiet in Teheran (translated from German)
War and violence also features heavily in this year’s list with Ana Paula Maia’s On Earth As It is Beneath (translated from Portuguese) , Mathias Enard’s The Deserters (translated from French), and Anjet Daanje’s The Forgotten Soldier (translated from Dutch).
Magical realism appears not only in Cámara’s aforementioned novel but in Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child (translated from Danish) as well. Money, power and influence are discussed in The Director by Daniel Kehlman (translated from German), and Small Comfort by Ia Genberg (translated from Swedish). Finally, Matteo Melchiorre’s The Duke (translated from Italian) bears resemblance to writers like Riccardo Bacchelli, following a 19th century Duke who is confronted with a critical decision to make.
Among the judges on this year’s panel are recent Hist Gold Medal recipient and classicist Mary Beard as well as Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker. To learn more about the longlisted titles or the judges selecting the works, visit the Booker Prize website:
https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/2026
