Poets & Writers Theater

“There really isn’t anything quite like a book to understand the perspective of others, and translated fiction takes that even further.” In this video, singer, songwriter, and host of the Service95 Book Club podcast Dua Lipa delivers the opening speech for the tenth anniversary of the International Booker Prize about the impact and importance of translated literature.

In this Cover to Cover podcast interview hosted by Emily Y. Wu, writer and translator Lin King talks about the nuances of Taiwanese and Japanese culture, and the process of translating Yáng Shuāng-zi’s novel Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press, 2024), which won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature and the 2026 International Booker Prize. “I feel like the food was, in some ways, the toughest part for me to translate,” says King.

In this short video about the novel Kairos (Granta Books, 2023), winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize, German author Jenny Erpenbeck speaks about the universality of themes of hope, decay, and disappointment in the story and translator Michael Hoffmann talks about maintaining the spirit of the text through translation.

Looking for a new book to read? See the shortlisted titles for the 2023 International Booker Prize, which highlights fiction from all five continents translated into English. The six books include Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated from Catalan by Julia Sanches; Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim; and The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé, translated from French by Richard Philcox.

“I think it’s a brave shortlist—we’ve picked books that are daring, experimental, not at all conventional,” says Valeria Luiselli about the six books selected for the 2020 International Booker Prize shortlist in this video with fellow judges Lucie Campos, Jennifer Croft, Ted Hodgkinson, and Jeet Thayil.