International Booker Prize Announces Longlist: Ten Languages and 13 First-Time Nominated Writers

The International Booker Prize has announced this year's longlist. All 13 writers are nominated for the Prize for the first time. They are now competing for the £50,000 prize for the best book translated into English, which will be shared equally between the winning author and the translators.

Each book on the long list offers something fresh, challenging and rewarding, from the weight of family history to the spectre of human extinction. Among them are several works based on personal experience or inspired by real events, according to the prize's website. 

None of this year's shortlisted authors have previously appeared on the long list of the Man Booker Prize, but they are far from ‘unknown’. Some of them may be unfamiliar to English-speaking audiences, but they have already won many awards and accolades in their home countries and beyond.  

The long list includes 10 original languages: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Romanian and Spanish. Heart Lamp becomes the first book nominated for the IBP to be originally written in Kannada, the first language of about 38 million people, spoken mainly in southern India.  

The long list also includes authors of different nationalities: Danes, French, Indians, Italians, Japanese, Palestinians, Romanians, Mexicans, Swiss and Surinamese-Dutch. Romania is represented on the longlist for the first time.  

Meanwhile, the translators on the long list represent seven countries: Iraq, France, Brazil, Japan, India, the United States and the United Kingdom.

As The Gaze previously wrote, Svetonius' gossipy account of the lives of the first 12 Roman emperors, Lives of the Caesars, made the Sunday Times hardback non-fiction chart in 2025, 2,000 years after it was written.