This year’s International Booker Prize shortlist presents a diverse and intriguing array of books that all demonstrate the highly creative imagination and inventiveness of their authors – and translators, of course.

Readers are invited to immerse themselves in six richly told tales from Bulgaria to Brazil and several points in between. Across these novels, we meet the unreliable narrator of a meta-fiction, a failed modern witch, a family of Iranian émigrés, a filmmaker compromised by the Nazis, a brutal prison warden, and a gender-traversing figure who seeks to save their own skin by shapeshifting.

Booker panel chair Natasha Brown has great praise for the shortlist, saying: “With narratives that capture moments from across the past century, these books reverberate with history. While there’s heartbreak, brutality and isolation among these stories, their lasting effect is energising.”

Here, our six literary experts guide you through the nominations for 2026.

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King

Set in 1930s Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, this exquisitely layered novel follows Japanese writer Aoyama Chizuko and her Taiwanese interpreter Ông Tshian-ho'h through a culinary and emotional landscape seeded with deliberate breadcrumbs: details that only reveal their full significance upon return visits to the book.

Taiwan Travelogue’s meta-fictional architecture is quietly audacious. Yang frames the narrative through a fictional author, a fictional translator and their respective silences, making the unreliable narrator not merely a device but a structural argument about whose knowledge counts and whose remains obstructed.

What makes the book genuinely pleasurable, however, is its treatment of intimacy between the two women. The queer undertow is rendered through the minute economies of shared meals and unfinished sentences, through which Yang smuggles the most profound........

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