September 2025

English PEN and the Booker Prize Foundation are delighted to announce the winners of the inaugural round of PEN Presents x International Booker Prize – an edition of the English PEN award for sample translations, launched in partnership with the Booker Prize Foundation to support translators from the Global Majority.

The six winning projects include:

Sample translations of six titles representing five languages and five regions
The first PEN Presents winners showcasing work originally published in Malay, Filipino and Cebuano, and the first from the Philippines
Previous PEN Presents winner and International Booker Prize-longlisted translator Tiffany Tsao, along with five translators selected for the programme for the first time
Translation samples that are ‘stunningly different in voice and style and theme, and stunningly alike in their brilliance’.

Since 2016, submissions to both English PEN’s PEN Translates programme and the International Booker Prize have told the same story: while the representation of authors of the Global Majority is increasing, translators from the Global Majority remain significantly underrepresented. PEN Presents x International Booker Prize was launched in 2024 to address this disparity by funding and promoting the work of Global Majority translators so that more literature in translation, created by more people, reaches English-language readers.  

The six winners were chosen from a shortlist of 12 samples, by a cross-sector panel of seven experts.

The winning translators have received editorial support from English PEN and worked with experienced editors over the last month, and their samples are now available to read on the English PEN website here. These projects will be promoted to publishers and commissioning editors in the UK and the wider Anglophone publishing landscape. Half of all PEN Presents-winning projects have since been acquired by publishers.

The winning translators are:

John Bengan for a translation from the Cebuano of The Man with a Thousand Names: Stories by R. Joseph Dazo (Philippines)
Christian Jil R. Benitez for a translation from the Filipino of Time of the Eye by Alvin B. Yapan (Philippines)
Pauline Fan for a translation from the Malay of The Last Days of Jesselton by Ruhaini Matdarin (Malaysia)
Mayada Ibrahim and Najlaa Eltom for a translation from the Arabic of Ireme by Stella Gaitano (Sudan)
Tiffany Tsao for a translation from the Indonesian of The Born Out of Wedlock Club by Grace Tioso (Indonesia)
Anam Zafar for a translation from the Arabic of Playing with Soldiers by Tariq Asrawi (Palestine)

Read the full article on PEN’s website
Photo taken from Hunter CUNY