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Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →The 2022 International Booker shortlist brought together six books from six countries and six source languages—but seven translators, because Sam Bett and David Boyd worked together on Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven. Their interviews reveal how translation depends on choices about voice, form, collaboration and the way a book works in English. Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, won the prize.
The six shortlisted books and their translators
The shortlist crossed Korean, Norwegian, Japanese, Spanish, Hindi and Polish. The list below follows the books’ distinct subjects and approaches; it is not the prize ranking.
| Book and author | Translator(s) | Language and country | What shapes the book |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung | Anton Hur | Korean; South Korea | Stories that blur horror, magical realism and science fiction. |
| A New Name: Septology VI–VII by Jon Fosse | Damion Searls | Norwegian; Norway | Incantatory, hypnotic fiction offering an unusual reading experience. |
| Heaven by Mieko Kawakami | Sam Bett and David Boyd | Japanese; Japan | A bullied 14-year-old narrator; its translators discuss voice, collaboration and music. |
| Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro | Frances Riddle | Spanish; Argentina | Crime fiction concerned with morality and freedom, shaped by its protagonist’s Parkinson’s disease and medication schedule. |
| Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree | Daisy Rockwell | Hindi; India | A novel about an 80-year-old woman that challenges borders of religion, country and gender. |
| The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk | Jennifer Croft | Polish; Poland | Historical fiction about religious leader Jacob Frank and a changing, multicultural Europe. |
The official shortlist and interview index identifies the books, translators and source languages: Booker Prize Foundation’s 2022 translator interviews.
How the translators approached voice, form and collaboration
Sam Bett and David Boyd on Heaven
Bett describes translation as “a fascinating opportunity to respond both critically and creatively to a text.” He and Boyd spent time discussing how to do justice to Kawakami’s language, and used pop music to help find voices for the English version. Boyd says that translating means “living with a book for a very long time” and that inhabiting Kojima’s mind and speech was both a joy and a challenge. A shared soundtrack gave the two translators a common tonal reference as they worked. Their accounts are in the interviews with Sam Bett and David Boyd.
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Frances Riddle on Elena Knows
Riddle says the novel’s long sentences, long paragraphs and unmarked speech first drew her in, while also making the translation challenging. Her process began with a literal English draft, checked paragraph by paragraph against the Spanish. Only after that close comparison did she focus on what would work for English readers. The method shows how structural fidelity and readability can be addressed in stages rather than treated as a single choice. Riddle’s interview discusses the process.
Jennifer Croft on The Books of Jacob
Croft calls translation “a kind of apprenticeship in creative writing,” a way to learn from writers working with different linguistic tools. She describes the collaborative nature of translation and the challenge of carrying across the novel’s varied eighteenth-century settings and vocabulary. The work is not only about finding equivalents for individual words; it also involves attending to how language shifts across place, period and context. Read Croft’s interview.
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Anton Hur, Damion Searls and Daisy Rockwell
The official interview index also features Q&As with Hur, Searls and Rockwell. Those interviews establish that each translator took part in the series, but the specific remarks covered here do not attribute further methods or anecdotes to them.
The winner and the 2022 prize
Tomb of Sand won the 2022 International Booker Prize. The Booker Prize Foundation described it as the first book originally written in any Indian language to win the International Booker, and the first Hindi-translated novel to receive the award. The 7 April 2022 announcement said the £50,000 prize was shared equally between author Geetanjali Shree and translator Daisy Rockwell. It also announced £2,500 for each shortlisted author and translator, increased from £1,000 in previous years, and stated a total prize value of £80,000. These are figures from the 2022 announcement, not a statement of current prize terms. See the Foundation’s 2022 prize announcement.
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Where to start reading
Each shortlisted title offers a different route into the translators’ questions about voice and form:
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- Choose Heaven to see how two translators describe building a shared approach to a young narrator’s voice.
- Choose Elena Knows for an account of translating long, continuous prose through close, staged revision.
- Choose The Books of Jacob for the challenge of rendering a historical novel’s changing settings and vocabulary.
- Choose Cursed Bunny, A New Name: Septology VI–VII or Tomb of Sand to explore, respectively, genre-blurring stories, hypnotic fiction or a novel that crosses social and national borders.
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