Small presses loom large on International Booker prize longlist

Nine of 13 nominated titles for this year’s £50,000 award for the best translated fiction come from indie publishers

Some of the smallest publishers in the UK are doing the heaviest lifting seeking out the best translated fiction, with the longlist for this year’s International Booker prize dominated by tiny presses at the expense of their wealthier rivals.

The £50,000 award, which is split evenly between writer and translator, is for the finest translated fiction from around the world, with previous winners including Korean bestseller Han Kang and Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. Settings for the 13 novels up for this year’s prize range from Iran – in Shokoofeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, narrated by the ghost of a 13-year-old girl fleeing her home after the 1979 revolution – to South Africa, in Willem Anker’s Red Dog, described by judges as “a novel of serpentine, swashbuckling sentences that capture the mounting cruelty of the colonial project”.

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