International Booker Prize 2026: heartbreak, brutality, shapeshifting – six experts review the nominees

By Vinicius de Carvalho, Director, King's Brazil Institute and Senior Lecturer for Brazilian Studies, King's College London
Boriana Alexandrova, Senior Lecturer in English & Related Literature, Centre of Women's Studies, University of York
Eva Cheuk-Yin Li, Lecturer in Screen Industries, King's College London
Karolina Watroba, Lecturer in German Studies, Department of European Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh
Marion Gibson, Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures, University of Exeter
Narguess Farzad, Senior Lecturer in Persian Studies, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, SOAS, University of London

This year’s International Booker Prize shortlist presents a diverse and intriguing array of books that all demonstrate the highly creative imagination and inventiveness of their authors – and translators, of course.

Readers are invited to immerse themselves in six richly told tales from Bulgaria to Brazil and several points in between. Across these novels, we meet the unreliable narrator of a meta-fiction, a failed modern witch, a family of Iranian émigrés, a filmmaker compromised by the Nazis, a brutal prison warden, and a gender-traversing figure who seeks to save their own skin by…

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