Alright, be honest with us. If you had to pick one prize that championed Indian literary translations, which would it be?
Would it be the (now-defunct) JCB Prize for Literature? Would it be the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize? Or could it perhaps be that behemoth, the International Booker Prize?
Since 2006, the International Booker Prize has annually awarded the best fiction work of the year from around the world, translated into English. Last year, in 2025, the award went to Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi. In 2022, Geetanjali Shree’s Hindi novel translated into English as Tomb of Sand by Daisy Rockwell, won the International Booker Prize.
There’s no denying its heft. An international prize of the stature of the Booker naturally brings fresh voices to new readers unwilling to be hedged in by the constraints of language and country. And there has been tangible growth too. Since 2016, for instance, sales of translated fiction in the UK have doubled. Thanks in part to the International Booker, translation is no longer viewed as a secondary literary exercise but as a crucial bridge connecting cultures and communities across languages. Books translated from Spanish, Portuguese, Farsi, Taiwanese Mandarin, books that might once have barely grazed the fringes of Anglophile publishing, are now getting catapulted to the top of the literary pile. And this is as it should be. The 2026 winner, Taiwan Travelogue, is a romping, ‘captivating, slyly sophisticated’ novel, according to the judges, one that “succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.” Imagine missing out on such splendor!
Quite naturally, you might view the translation scene in rather roseate hues. And there is no denying that Indian publishers have done their bit to publish translations for decades.
“Translations have always been happening in India, both between regional languages and into and from English,” explains Deepa Bhasthi, the International Booker award-winning translator of Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp. “A big prize brings welcome attention to the field, for sure, and to the crucial work that translators do. There seems to be an upswing in interest in publishing translations, which is a good sign. And there is a heightened interest in learning how to translate as well, as evidenced by the popularity of translation workshops and retreats like Siyahi’s Chapter Five – Translation retreat.”
Rahul Soni, writer, translator, and editor-at-large with HarperCollins Publishers India largely agrees.”Translations (from other Indian languages into English) have consistently been published here – both homegrown publishers and the Indian offices of MNC publishers have been doing this work for decades,” he says. “t’s just that with a Booker Prize the media too has begun to notice. But the fact remains that the limelight only really falls upon the book that has won; other translated works, including the winning author and translator’s other books, don’t really see any increased interest or attention.” His translation of Shrikant Verma’s Magadh was recently reviewed in the New Yorker, but has it resulted in any tangible change for the work? Unclear.
Soni points to literary agents who push translated work to a Western Anglophile audience, as well as to organizations that support translations – the Ashoka Center, PEN, SALT (South Asian Literature in Translation), Words Without Borders, the NIF Translation Fellowships, amongst multiple others. This work is crucial, as translations resist majoritarian narratives about language and community by writing from the margins. They become a gentle balancing of the scales.
However, complications lurk a-plenty.
For one, this is a country that speaks hundreds of tongues, but only 22 are deemed official languages by the Government. Institutional recognition naturally follows the official pattern – the Sahitya Akademi, India’s foremost literary body, only awards translation prizes for those 22 officially- recognized Indian languages. The result is what’s often called a translation pyramid: languages like Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, and Tamil get highlighted far more often than others, largely because they have more readers and translators, making them commercially safer bets.
Bhasthi draws a line under the second issue. “I think translated works from Western countries travel more than our own Indian writing does because of the way marketing and publishing budgets work there,” says Bhasthi. “Many readers are also happy to read translations from Western languages but are not curious enough about Indian languages. That needs to change. We in India, in South Asia should be reading as many stories from our region as we read books that come to us from the West.”
It follows therefore that the International Booker’s disproportionate cultural weight in India deserves scrutiny. After all, the prize is restricted to books published in the UK and Ireland, which automatically excludes the vast majority of literature published across the rest of the world. Can such a prize meaningfully judge the best English-language translation of that year? On the other hand, it’s impossible to underestimate the International Booker’s impact; after all, four of its writers that it spotlit have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature: Kang, Tokarczuk, Annie Ernaux and Jon Fosse.
So what would a fuller reckoning look like? Perhaps not another prize, but a shift in what gets counted as worth translating in the first place — more funding and institutional attention for a wider variety of languages, and a widening, hopefully, of our literary tastes as well. Until then, the Booker and its counterparts will keep doing what prizes do best: casting a bright, temporary light on a handful of books, while the deeper work of building infrastructure for the rest continues, as it always has, mostly out of view.
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