International Booker Prize

Rabbit's Hole by Mark Bellingham is read by Maxine Peake and runs for 9 hours and 53 minutes.

Nominated for the 2026 International Booker Award, the director by Daniel Kelman was given to us by Riverrun from the Hachette Group.

Why am I in this car? I'll sit still.

Sometimes, if you don't move, your memory comes back.

This is their debut.

And it's won the Women's Prize, the International Booker Prize.

And I enjoyed it.

But I know it's not a book for everyone.

Minister of Culture Lee Yun is on his first official tour of the UK, which included a stop at King's College London.

Lee was invited to speak at a forum titled Taiwanese Literature Through a Global Glaze and spoke with the judges of the prestigious International Booker Prize.

Starting off from Taiwan Travelogue, which won the award this year, Lee presented how different authors from Taiwan portray their homeland.

Let's hear more.

...

International Booker Prize.

[laughs] And it also was the winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

So-

I think what, what I've learned from you in this conversation [laughs] and through no personal self-reflection over time, is that I should pay better attention to the type of award, because I know that I won't like Booker books, but now I do understand that I like National Book Award books.

I also know that it's very hit-and-miss for a lot of other ones, like-

But what if you stumble upon Taiwan Travelogue, which b- won both the National Book Award and the International Booker Prize?

Hmm.

Next up is Claudia Pinero's Elena Knows, translated by Francis Riddle, Argentinian writer, Spanish.

And this book really looks, it was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

And Again, look into it for more detail yourself, but it tracks a mother trying to track down the final moments of her daughter's life.

It's set in one day.

It's as big a mystery to me as it is to everybody else.

But I enjoy the challenge of going through, you know, the 12 shortlisted books that come out in the summer or the books that are for the International Booker Prize because they just open your eyes to new authors, countries perhaps that you don't know very much about, circumstances that you don't know too much about.

I try to maintain a balance of reading fiction and nonfiction, so the Booker keeps me honest.

Does it feel to you like fiction is in a pretty good place right now? I argue this to my friends.

Joining him is Angela Rodel, a brilliant linguist, musician, and translator whose artistic empathy carries the flowing cadences from the Bulgarian language into vivid English.

Together, this creative duo made history by winning the International Booker Prize for Time Shelter, the first book written in Bulgarian to ever receive the honor.

Time Shelter is a dark, funny, prescient novel that came out at the start of COVID.

It begins with an enigmatic psychiatrist opening a clinic that treats Alzheimer's patients by recreating past decades to match their internal clocks and memories.

Her current research explores artivism, indigenous language translation and human rights.

More recently, Ileana's translation from Spanish into Guaraní appears in Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's We Are Green and Trembling, which was long listed for the International Booker Prize in 2026 and was published by Penguin.

Hi, Ileana.

Thank you so much for joining me.

I love a translator's note.

And, you know, as we've just seen with...

Taiwan Travelogue, the winner of the International Booker Prize, you can pepper a text with footnotes.

Like, readers want to know all the context, and especially, I think, with a language as expansive as this.

Yes, that is an accurate description.

The book was long-listed for this year's International Booker Prize, and the author Olga Ravn said in an interview with them that as a child she was convinced she was a witch.

Whoa, really?

She, she taught herself to read and write runes.