I’m always hungry to read not originally written in English. There is so much out there and we get to see so little of it because so little is translated and most of what is translated is written by men. The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, run by the University of Warwick sets out to address that imbalance. Here’s how they describe the prize.

The prize launched in 2017 with the aim of addressing the gender imbalance in translated literature and increasing the number of international women’s voices accessible to a British and Irish readership. A report by Nielsen Book showed that in 2015 translated literary fiction made up only 3.5% of the literary fiction titles published in the UK, but accounted for 7% of the volume of sales. If translated literature as a whole was underrepresented on the British book market, then women’s voices in translation were even more peripheral. The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, for example, was awarded 21 times, but was won by a woman only twice.

In the words of Maureen Freely, former President of English PEN and Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick: “We’ve come a long way with the championing of world literature over the past decade, welcoming in a multiplicity of voices which have gone on to enrich us all. In the same period, however, we’ve noticed that it is markedly more difficult for women to make it into English translation. This prize offers us an opportunity to welcome in the voices and perspectives we’ve missed thus far.”

The 2025 longlist has just been released. You can read about nominated books in this post by Word by Word.