The International Booker Prize will henceforth be known as the Bukhman International Booker Prize. Grant-giving organisation Bukhman Philanthropies has committed to funding the next ten years of the prize, following its support in 2026, and in recognition of the decade-long partnership, the prize will carry the Bukhman name going forward. The announcement coincides with the prize entering its tenth year, a milestone that, by any measure, has reshaped the global appetite for literature in translation.

The money has changed too, and significantly. The prize fund for the winning title will double in value from £50,000 to £100,000, split equally between the author and translator. Each shortlisted title will continue to be awarded £5,000, divided between author and translator. The doubling of the top prize is a meaningful statement on the equal importance of the translator, putting more money on the table is a way of putting weight behind the argument.

The case for what the prize has accomplished over ten years is made in numbers. In the UK, sales of translated fiction have risen by 31 per cent, driven largely by readers under the age of 35. The rights to original editions of International Booker-nominated books have been sold in dozens of additional territories as a result of the light shone on them by the prize. And five International Booker Prize winners or nominees have gone on to win the Nobel Prize for their body of work.

The 2027 judging panel has also been announced. It is chaired by Katie Kitamura, whose novel Audition was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is joined by writer and Oxford professor of French and Comparative Literature Patrick McGuinness; British-Ghanaian novelist Caleb Azumah Nelson; Danish author and International Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Olga Ravn; and actress and producer Tessa Thompson. Nelson, whose debut Open Water made him one of the most talked-about voices in contemporary Black British fiction, brings particular resonance to a panel tasked with finding the best translated fiction in the world.

Kitamura framed the prize’s mission with her characteristic precision. She described translation as a dialogue between two minds, and said the prize is exemplary in the way it recognises the work of both participants, adding that the celebration and support of this intrinsically human collaboration feels particularly vital right now. It is a sentiment that carries extra weight in a moment when the global literary conversation is increasingly fragmented by language and geography.

For readers of African literature, the Bukhman International Booker Prize remains one of the most important pipelines through which fiction from outside the Anglophone mainstream reaches wider audiences and the doubled prize money is, in practical terms, an argument that the work of translation deserves to be properly compensated. The longlist for 2027 will be announced in March.