Inside The Booker Prize Judging Room: “What 154 Books Taught Me About Translation, Taste & Trust”

What does it really take to crown the best translated book in the world? On 20 May, the International Booker Prize – arguably the most prestigious award for fiction in translation – was announced at London’s Tate Modern. This year’s judging panel was chaired by Max Porter, acclaimed author of Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, which Dua chose as her Monthly Read for April 2025. In this exclusive account, he pulls back the curtain on the thoughtful debates, quiet revelations and unexpected moments that shaped the final decision. 

The International Booker Prize is my favourite of the big literary prizes for a few reasons. I really like that the prize money is split between the author and the translator. I also think it’s a tremendous prize for discoverability. Every year when the longlist comes out, I find writers and translators I didn’t know about.

I love books in translation and always have. Many of my favourite books are translated from another language. I guess because I want to find out about the world, and it feels like a small miracle that I can get inside people’s heads in languages I don’t speak.

I have a special soft spot for this prize because, a few years ago, when I was an editor, one of the books I worked on won it. That book was The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith: a book with genuine world-changing powers; a stunning work of art. Winning the International Booker Prize brought her to a global readership and also helped many more Western readers discover Korean literature. Kang won the Nobel Prize last year. In her acceptance speech, she talked about literature being by its very nature in opposition to violence. I feel the same. I think literature in translation is a crucial part of cultural resistance to authoritarianism, bigotry and xenophobia.

Much as I love this prize, I’m a bit uneasy about prizes in general. I think it’s hard to choose one book and say it’s better than the rest – according to what criteria? Literature is entirely subjective. And that’s the point. Different consciousnesses react wildly different to language, images and ideas. Literature in translation celebrates that difference.

The Booker Prize Foundation, which administers the prize, is great at keeping this question alive: how best to administer the prize; publicise it; how best to be as transparent as possible about the processes and aims of the prize. The International Booker Prize team really listens to translators, writers, publishers and readers about their experience of the prize.

As a jury, we tended to take it in turns to discuss a book: why it did or didn’t work for us; what we especially noticed about the translation; about how a book succeeded (or not) at doing the unique thing it was trying to do. There were healthy disagreements, and many revelations gifted to each other from different vantage points. As we focused in on our shortlist, we got into the proper nitty gritty; about sentences, structure, editorial choices, politics and what we most wanted our winning book to achieve. We only once used a voting system, to narrow our shortlist down.

It has been fascinating, and much more challenging than I’d expected. Firstly, the world doesn’t pause to let you read. My fellow judges and I have been reading books while a genocide has been going on, while Trump flipped the world on its head, while people rioted in the streets in the UK against migrants.

Reading books takes time. We’ve all got jobs and families, commitments elsewhere, dinners to cook and so on. My fellow judge Beth Orton recorded an album during this process! And you can’t cheat. Every judge reads every book. The prize had more submissions than ever before, so we ended up reading 154 books in six months – sometimes two books a day. It was insane, and wonderful. I’ve learned so much from my fellow judges, because we all see the world differently, we all read differently. Our longlist was mostly from independent publishers, which we didn’t realise until afterwards, but I think is wonderful. Most of the translators had never been listed for the prize before, which is also very exciting. No list can please all the people all the time, but our longlist went down really well.

The shortlist and winner meetings were tough. Having to say goodbye to books we love and believe in was brutal. But even when we disagreed, we did so in a beautifully collegiate way. I’ve never seen people listen to one another as intently as the judges listened, as we went through how these books had been working on us and what had changed for us on a second, then third reading. It’s very intimate and very exposing.

Our winner is Heart Lamp, by Banu Mushtaq, translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhashti. It’s the first collection of stories to win the prize, which makes me so happy as someone who loves short stories. It’s a beautiful book bustling with life, with drama and satire, with beautiful multiplicities of dialects, characters and cultures. It focuses mainly on the lives of Muslim women and feels like a radical and wonderful gift to English readers who might never have heard of the Kannada language (which is spoken by over 60 million people), let alone read a book translated from the language. All the hard work of reading 154 books and all my hesitancy about prizes disappeared when Banu and Deepa took to the stage and spoke so powerfully about what literature means. Banu said these words, and I cherish them: “This book was born from the belief that no story is ever small; that in the tapestry of human experience, every thread holds the weight of the whole.”