When a reader strolls into a bookshop, they enter a rich universe of literary imagination, yet historically, great swathes of stories from around the world have been missing from the shelves. While translated literature as a whole has long fought for the attention of Anglophone booksellers, female authors writing in different languages have faced a double invisibility.
Enter the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Established in 2017 to address such structural publishing imbalances, this annual accolade champions and propels international women’s voices from the periphery into mainstream cultural conversations.
The Women in Translation Prize at a Glance
Presented annually by the University of Warwick, the prize celebrates the finest full-length book written by a woman translated into English, published in the UK or Ireland. All literary genres are welcomed: novels, poetry, creative non-fiction, graphic novels, children’s or YA fiction, short story collections, novellas and plays.
Posthumous submissions are accepted, pairing classic literature from Nobel prizewinners like Nelly Sachs (1891-1970) with contemporary voices. Crucially, entry is completely free with no limits on eligible titles thereby eliminating financial hurdles for independent presses and reflecting the full spectrum of literary genres. The complete submissions list is published every year, unlike other literary prizes.
Works must be published for the first time in print form between April and March the following year. Written originally in any language other than English by a woman, the books can be translated by a translator (or translators) of any gender. The £1,000 prize is split equally between the author and her translator(s). In cases where the writer is deceased, the translator receives the full prize fund.
Launched in 2017, the prize was born out of bleak statistics highlighting gender disparities in translated fiction. A Nielsen Book survey revealed that in 2015, translated literary fiction accounted for just 3.5% of literary titles published in the UK (despite representing 7% of volume sales). Worse still, women were drastically under-represented within that slice: the prestigious Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, for instance, had been awarded twenty-one times, but only twice by a woman.
‘We’ve come a long way with the championing of world literature over the past decade . . . In the same period, however, we’ve noticed that it is markedly more difficult for women to make it into English translation. This prize offers us an opportunity to welcome in the voices and perspectives we’ve missed thus far,’ Maureen Freely, former President of English PEN and Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick
By acting as a ‘rallying call to translators and publishers everywhere,’ in the words of Professor Emerita Susan Bassnett, the prize has helped transform the ecosystem. Across the industry, female-authored translations have crept upwards from 28% in 2015 to roughly 33% today, while submission numbers for the prize itself exploded from fifty-eight entries in 2017 to one hundred and forty-five across thirty-four languages in 2025.
The Visionaries and the Judges
The initiative is sustained by a dedicated network of scholars, advocates and literary experts, namely Maureen Freely, Holly Langstaff and Elif Gülez. The first judging panel was chaired by Boyd Tonkin alongside Susan Bassnett and Amanda Hopkinson. The prize grew out of a collective ecosystem of translators, publishers, bloggers and advocates collaborating to address gender imbalance. Established in 2017, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation complemented the grassroots #WITmonth initiative, launched in 2015, to further elevate female writers in translation.
The 2026 Judging Panel
Boyd Tonkin, journalist, editor and author of The 100 Best Novels in Translation has been a dedicated advocate for international literature since judging the original Independent Foreign Fiction Prize — founded in 1990 by The Independent newspaper’s literary editor Robert Winder, author of Bloody Foreigners. Tonkin succeeded Winder as literary editor and relaunched the prize in 2001, and went on to oversee its 2015 merger with the International Booker Prize. He was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal in 2020.
‘As always, it is a privilege to encounter so many varied and excellent books, and it’s a particular treat to be able to consider the kinds of titles – poetry, narrative non-fiction, classics and rediscoveries – that don’t find a place in straightforward fiction prizes,’ Boyd Tonkin
Arifa Akbar is chief theatre critic for The Guardian, former literary editor at The Independent and author of Consumed (shortlisted for the Costa and PEN Ackerley prizes). She has judged the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Baillie Gifford Prize.
Véronique Tadjo is an acclaimed Ivorian author, poet and academic. Her novel on the West African Ebola epidemic, In the Company of Men, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. It was discussed at the BookBlast Translation Book Club at Hatchards in October 2025.
Winners Since 2017: A Mosaic of Languages & Cultures
From Nordic memoirs to Asian graphic novels, the prize spans geography and linguistic traditions worldwide. Winning books have been translated from Swedish, German, Arabic, Hindi, Croatian, and Japanese (via German).
2025 And the Walls Became the World All Around by Johanna Ekström & Sigrid Rausing, translated by Sigrid Rausing (Granta Books)
‘When her best friend, the acclaimed Swedish writer Johanna Ekström, became terminally ill with cancer, Rausing promised to complete her last book. She edited the thirteen handwritten notebooks, adding her own commentary. And the Walls Became the World All Around is a brave and beautiful memoir of Ekström’s final two years, and a moving meditation on grief and friendship,’ Lisa Allardice, The Guardian Interview with Sigrid Rausing
Widely praised across the Swedish literary press and cultural magazines, including Dagens Nyheter.
BUY And the Walls Became the World All Around
2024 Revelation Freshly Erupting: Collected Poetry by Nelly Sachs, translated by Andrew Shanks (Carcanet)
‘Nelly Sachs is not as well-known as she ought to be but last month the translator Andrew Shanks received the eighth Warwick Prize for Women Writers in Translation on behalf of both himself and Sachs. Revelation Freshly Erupting includes all the lyric poetry published during Sachs’ lifetime, together with a collection of posthumous writing, an introductory essay and notes. It offers an effective catalogue raisonnée of Sachs’ life’s work,’ The Jewish Chronicle
Awards: 2024 Schlegel-Tieck Prize, 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature
BUY Revelation Freshly Erupting: Collected Poetry
2023 Your Wish Is My Command by Deena Mohamed, translated by the author (Granta Books)
‘At the heart of this compelling and eye-catching magic realist tale is one of Cairo’s multipurpose street kiosks, of the sort that sell cigarettes, fizzy drinks and other cheap essentials. Atypically, Abu Shokry’s kiosk also offers three “first-class” wishes at a “huge discount”. The story of how these items came into his hands, and how they disrupt the lives of three people who must decide if and how best to use them, frames Mohamed’s sharp critique of inequality,’ Times Literary Supplement
Awards: 2024 Excellence in Graphic Literature Award for Adult Fiction, 2024 Arab American Book Award for Fiction
2022 Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell (Tilted Axis Press)
‘The fun lies in the novel’s linguistic exuberance: puns, comma-less disquisitions, alliteration, double entendre, euphony. In the afterword, the translator, Daisy Rockwell, talks about Shree’s relish for the sound of words, their dhwani; though fluent in English, she wrote the novel in her mother tongue, Hindi, in order to give assonance full rein,’ London Review of Books
Awards: 2022 International Booker Prize, 2019 English PEN Translates Award
2022 Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village by Marit Kapla, translated by Peter Graves (Penguin Books)
‘Kapla, who grew up in Osebol, interviewed almost every adult in the village, ranging in age from eighteen to ninety-two. Two-thirds of them were born in the first half of the last century; just one was born in this. Each life story is given in fragments that have been intensively lineated. Although these are not poems, Kapla takes a poet’s approach, attending to the rhythms of thought and breaking the natural phrase as if breaking a surface,’ London Review of Books
Awards: 2019 Sweden’s August Prize for Fiction; a Sunday Telegraph and Guardian Book of the Year
2021 An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky, translated by Jackie Smith (MacLehose Press)
‘Inventory spans not only centuries and space but also styles, from recollections of Schalansky’s childhood in East Germany to essays on the religious teachings of Manichaeism to a fictionalised radio transmission from Swiss outsider artist Armand Schulthess. It’s a blend that emulates (perhaps deliberately) the Kunstkammern that once graced the homes of distinguished Central European gentry: nautilus shells, geodes, tarnished Roman coins . . . stuffed storks peeking out at their curious viewers with eyes of amber glass,’ Harvard Review Online
Awards: 2021 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize 2021 and Translators’ Association First Translation Prize (both awarded to Jackie Smith)
2020 The Eighth Life (for Brilka): A Novel by Nino Haratischvili, translated by Charlotte Collins & Ruth Martin (Scribe UK)
‘A tragicomic saga recounting the turbulent lives and often thwarted passions of six generations in a single Georgian family, The Eighth Life is a panoramic attempt to make sense of the “red century” across Europe and the Caucasus . . . linking each generation in the family is the recipe for a much-coveted and perilously addictive chocolate elixir . . . a recurring leitmotif that stands as a metaphor for the intoxicating temptations of political ideology,’ Times Literary Supplement
AWARDS: Longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize
BUY The Eighth Life (For Brilka)
2019 The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
‘The form of The Years doesn’t follow any neat classification. It’s part fiction, part essay, part autobiography . . . this revolutionary book conveys a sense of history, consciousness and national identity like no other book I’ve read before. Narrated in a unique collective “we” voice it follows a woman and those around her from post-WWII through to the current Information Age. In doing so it provides such a unique shifting sense of time as it speaks from the perspective of people in an era of rapid change. Also, it regularly focuses on jarringly precise details that come close to poetry. Somehow it achieves the startling feat of being both intimately personal while also speaking as the collective voice of a generation. It’s extraordinary, beautiful and warrants prizes,’ Lonesome Reader blog
Awards: The 31st Annual French-American Foundation Translation Prize in non-fiction, 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature
2018 Belladonna by Daša Drndić, translated by Celia Hawkesworth (MacLehose Press)
‘Belladonna is brutal, beautiful, and unforgettable. Daša Drndić achieves her mission, proving that silence cannot erase the past. Memory stalks us, and always triumphs. It seems only right that a book of varied, sometimes interlinking tales should contain a bedtime story,” Los Angeles Review of Books
Awards: Daša Drndić won the 2014 Prozart International Literary Award
2017 Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky (Portobello Books)
‘In spite of links to the real histories of the three animals (particularly Knut, whose short life was obsessively recorded), these are dislocated and dreamlike fictions that disturb expectations: it’s not so much that the bears can interact with humans, read newspapers and, in the case of Knut’s grandmother, write an autobiography, but that these magical scenarios do not add up to a “world”; rather, we are never allowed to forget that these are the imaginings of a writer who can change direction on a whim,’ Guardian
Awards: Yoko Tawada won the 1993 Akutagawa Prize and 2016 Kleist Prize
Key Dates for your Diaries!
5 October 2026: Public announcement of the Longlist.
26 October: Public announcement of the Shortlist.
29 October: Celebratory event hosted by Veranda Books, ‘Unsilencing The Female Voice’ chaired by Maureen Freely
9 November: Online panel discussion hosted by BookBlast, ‘Translating the Female Experience’ chaired by Maureen Freely
16 November 2026: Award ceremony and winner announcement at The Shard, London.
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