Famous at home. Unknown in English.

Warwick Prize 2025 · Shortlist

Désirée Congo

Désirée Congo

Évelyne Trouillot · 66 when first published

Novel · 184 pages · Historical, War

Translated by M. A. Salvodon

AIAI-generated summary:In the French colony of Saint-Domingue, shortly before the final battle with the troops Napoleon sent to the island, a dreamy and unpredictable young woman and the people around her live through the upheaval that will end in Haiti's independence.

Warwick Prize 2025 · Shortlist

We Do Not Part

작별하지 않는다 · Jakbyeolhaji anneunda

Han Kang · 51 when first published

Novel · 272 pages · Historical, War

Translated by e. yaewon, Paige Aniyah Morris

AIAI-generated summary:A novelist haunted by a dream of black logs standing like gravestones in a snowy field gets an urgent call from a friend in hospital, who begs her to go to her house on Jeju that very day to save the bird left there alone.

Also: Daesan 2022 ★ winner

Warwick Prize 2025 · Shortlist

My Secret Life

My Secret Life

Krisztina Tóth · 58 when first published

Poetry · 80 pages

Translated by George Szirtes

AIAI-generated summary:A selection the poet made herself from her earlier books, with some new pieces: poems about lovers, parents and friends, grief and a sense of not belonging, that open into scenes of growing old, violence, animals bred for slaughter and death.

Warwick Prize 2025 · Shortlist

Too Great a Sky

Capătul drumului

Liliana Corobca · 43 when first published

Novel · 344 pages · Historical, War

Translated by Monica Cure

AIAI-generated summary:When her family decides to move Ana Blajinschi, nearly ninety, into a care home, a great-granddaughter is sent to win her over, but the old woman begins to tell her of her youth, when she was deported to the steppes of Kazakhstan.

Warwick Prize 2025 · Shortlist

Francis Bacon's Nanny

La Nourrice de Francis Bacon

Maylis Besserie · 41 when first published

Novel · 264 pages · Historical

Translated by Clíona Ní Ríordáin

AIAI-generated summary:Jessie Lightfoot, the nanny from Cornwall who shielded the painter Francis Bacon from his tyrannical father in childhood and from his worst excesses in London, speaks of the boy she adored.

Warwick Prize 2024 · Shortlist

Too Much of Life: Complete Chronicles

Todas as crônicas

Clarice Lispector · 98 when first published

Nonfiction · 400 pages

Translated by Robin Patterson, Margaret Jull Costa

AIAI-generated summary:All the newspaper columns of a Brazilian writer, above all her Saturday pieces for the Jornal do Brasil from 1967 to 1973, written almost as a diary: her sons, her home, maids, Rio, her past, friends, animals and art.

Warwick Prize 2024 · Shortlist

Greek Lessons

희랍어 시간 · Huirabeo sigan

Han Kang · 41 when first published

Novel · 192 pages

Translated by Deborah Smith, e. yaewon

AIAI-generated summary:In Seoul, a woman who has lost the power of speech takes classes in ancient Greek from a man who is slowly losing his sight, and the two withdrawn, isolated people gradually come closer.

Warwick Prize 2024 · Shortlist

Kairos

Kairos

Jenny Erpenbeck · 54 when first published

Novel · 293 pages · Love, Historical, Politics

Translated by Michael Hofmann

AIAI-generated summary:In East Berlin in the late 1980s, nineteen-year-old Katharina meets Hans, a married man in his mid-fifties, by chance, and for years neither can break away from the other.

Also: International Booker 2024 ★ winner

Warwick Prize 2024 · Shortlist

Sleepless

Pas dormir

Marie Darrieussecq · 52 when first published

Nonfiction · 320 pages · Autofiction

Translated by Penny Hueston

AIAI-generated summary:A writer who has suffered from insomnia for years recounts two decades of remedies, from sleeping pills and meditation to shamanism and technology, while asking who it is that stays awake when she cannot sleep.

Warwick Prize 2024 · Shortlist

White Nights

Białe noce

Urszula Honek · 35 when first published

Short stories · 162 pages

Translated by Kate Webster

AIAI-generated summary:In a small village in the foothills where on the surface nothing happens, lives slowly darken: someone dies in bed on a hot day, someone falls from an embankment, someone keeps wandering in the dark.

Warwick Prize 2023 · Shortlist

A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding

Ett system så magnifikt att det bländar

Amanda Svensson · 32 when first published

Novel · 527 pages · Family

Translated by Nichola Smalley

AIAI-generated summary:Triplets from Lund, a brother and two sisters who never got on easily and now live far apart, are pushed further from one another by a tragedy, as each heads off to a different corner of the world.

Warwick Prize 2023 · Shortlist

What Have You Left Behind?

ماذا تركتَ وراءك؟ · Madha tarakta wara'ak?

Bushra al-Maqtari · 39 when first published

Nonfiction · 200 pages · War, Politics

Translated by Sawad Hussain

AIAI-generated summary:Survivors of Yemen's war, people who have lost relatives and homes, bear witness to the dead and to the destruction they lived through, in testimonies gathered so that a forgotten war and its victims are not erased.

Warwick Prize 2023 · Shortlist

A Line in the World

En linje i verden

Dorthe Nors · 51 when first published

Nonfiction · 240 pages · Nature

Translated by Caroline Waight

AIAI-generated summary:Over the course of a year, the author travels the coastline that runs from Skagen at Denmark's northern tip to where the Wadden Sea begins in the Netherlands, in essays about the sea, the land and the people who live with an untamed nature.

Warwick Prize 2023 · Shortlist

Barcode

Vonalkód

Krisztina Tóth · 39 when first published

Short stories · 226 pages · Coming of age

Translated by Peter Sherwood

AIAI-generated summary:Stories that return to a childhood shaped by the 1970s, when a barcode marked everything that came from the West, and to the fears and reflexes the era left behind: anxiety, exclusion, and still, a childhood that was not all bad.

Also: Aegon 2007 shortlist

Warwick Prize 2023 · Shortlist

A Silence Shared

Tetto murato

Lalla Romano · 51 when first published

Novel · 192 pages · War, Love

Translated by Brian Robert Moore

AIAI-generated summary:In wartime, two married couples who are friends spend a winter shut in together in a remote house: Ada, a young schoolteacher, with her husband Paolo, an ailing intellectual exhausted by his time with the partisans, and Giulia with her husband Stefano.

Warwick Prize 2023 · Shortlist

The Remains

El rastro

Margo Glantz · 72 when first published

Novel · 134 pages

Translated by Ellen Jones

AIAI-generated summary:Nora García, a cellist, sits through the wake and burial of her former husband Juan, a celebrated pianist who has died of a heart attack, and as the ceremonies unfold she reflects on life and death, music and literature.

Warwick Prize 2023 · Shortlist

Cocoon

茧 · Jian

Zhang Yueran · 34 when first published

Novel · 330 pages · Family, Crime, Historical

Translated by Jeremy Tiang

AIAI-generated summary:Li Jiaqi and Cheng Gong, children of China's post-1980s generation, one weighed down by guilt and one bent on revenge, slowly unravel a terrible crime that binds their families across three generations.

Warwick Prize 2022 · Shortlist

Men Don't Cry

Un homme, ça ne pleure pas

Faïza Guène · 29 when first published

Novel · 216 pages · Family, Migration

Translated by Sarah Ardizzone

AIAI-generated summary:Mourad, a young man from Nice whose parents came from Algeria, is determined to shape his life on his own terms and terrified of ending up a fat, greying bachelor kept by his mother, but breaking away means confronting everything his family expects of him.

Warwick Prize 2022 · Shortlist

When I Sing, Mountains Dance

Canto jo i la muntanya balla

Irene Solà · 29 when first published

Novel · 198 pages · Nature

Translated by Mara Faye Lethem

AIAI-generated summary:In the high mountains between Camprodon and Prats de Molló, a storm kills Domènec, a farmer and poet, and the telling passes among women and men, ghosts and water spirits, clouds, mushrooms, dogs and roe deer.

Warwick Prize 2022 · Shortlist

Marzahn, Mon Amour

Marzahn, mon amour

Katja Oskamp · 49 when first published

Short stories · 144 pages · Autofiction

Translated by Jo Heinrich

AIAI-generated summary:In her mid-forties, with her child grown, her husband ill and her writing a source of disappointment, a novelist retrains as a chiropodist in Berlin-Marzahn, once East Germany's largest prefab housing estate, and writes down what her clients tell her.

Warwick Prize 2022 · Shortlist

Three Summers

Τα ψάθινα καπέλα · Ta psathina kapela

Margarita Liberaki · 27 when first published

Novel · 320 pages · Coming of age, Family, Love

Translated by Karen Van Dyck

AIAI-generated summary:Three sisters spend three summers at the house their grandfather built among the orchards outside Kifisia, near Athens, each discovering in her own way what she wants as love enters their lives.

Warwick Prize 2022 · Shortlist

Brickmakers

Ladrilleros

Selva Almada · 40 when first published

Novel · 160 pages · Family, Love

Translated by Annie McDermott

AIAI-generated summary:In a provincial town, Marciano Miranda and Pajarito Tamai, sons of two feuding families, take on their fathers' old hatreds, while desire draws them in a way the rigid codes of their world cannot allow.

Warwick Prize 2021 · Shortlist

The Art of Losing

L'Art de perdre

Alice Zeniter · 31 when first published

Novel · 400 pages · Family, Migration, Historical

Translated by Frank Wynne

AIAI-generated summary:Naïma, whose family comes from Algeria, sets out to learn the history her family never told her: why her grandfather Ali became a harki, and what her father lost when he came to France in 1962.

Also: Goncourt 2017 shortlist

Warwick Prize 2021 · Shortlist

Ellis Island: A People's History

Wyspa klucz

Małgorzata Szejnert · 73 when first published

Nonfiction · 400 pages · Migration, Historical

Translated by Sean Gasper Bye

AIAI-generated summary:Ellis Island, the small island off New York through which millions of immigrants entered the United States, seen through the fates of the migrants and of the doctors, nurses, interpreters and officials who worked there.

Warwick Prize 2021 · Shortlist

In Memory of Memory

Памяти памяти · Pamyati pamyati

Maria Stepanova · 45 when first published

Novel · 400 pages · Family, Autofiction

Translated by Sasha Dugdale

AIAI-generated summary:Setting out to write the story of her own family, a writer works through its archive of papers and objects and is soon asking whether the past can be kept in memory at all.

Also: International Booker 2021 shortlist

Warwick Prize 2021 · Shortlist

War of the Beasts and the Animals

War of the Beasts and the Animals

Maria Stepanova · 49 when first published

Poetry · 123 pages · War

Translated by Sasha Dugdale

AIAI-generated summary:Long poems about war and remembrance, two prompted by the fighting in eastern Ukraine and a third written for the hundredth anniversary of the First World War, alongside cycles of eerie ballads and reworked songs.

Warwick Prize 2021 · Shortlist

Breasts and Eggs

夏物語 · Natsu monogatari

Mieko Kawakami · 43 when first published

Novel · 448 pages · Family

Translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd

AIAI-generated summary:Natsuko, a 38-year-old novelist who grew up in Osaka's working-class backstreets and now lives in Tokyo, finds herself longing to meet a child of her own and begins to look into having one without a partner.

Warwick Prize 2021 · Shortlist

Our Lady of the Nile

Notre-Dame du Nil

Scholastique Mukasonga · 56 when first published

Novel · 240 pages · Politics, Coming of age

Translated by Melanie Mauthner

AIAI-generated summary:At a girls' secondary school high on the Congo-Nile ridge in Rwanda, where families send their daughters to stay chaste until arranged marriages and a quota limits Tutsi pupils, tensions build among the students.

Warwick Prize 2021 · Shortlist

Strange Beasts of China

异兽志 · Yi shou zhi

Yan Ge · 22 when first published

Novel · 320 pages · Speculative

Translated by Jeremy Tiang

AIAI-generated summary:In a world where humans and strange beasts live side by side, a young woman who has followed the beasts' fortunes as an onlooker discovers that she, too, has beast blood.

Warwick Prize 2020 · Shortlist

Lake Like a Mirror

湖面如鏡 · Humian ru jing

Ho Sok Fong · 44 when first published

Short stories · 199 pages

Translated by Natascha Bruce

AIAI-generated summary:Nine stories of women: a foreign bride clinging to her husband's child from an earlier marriage, a wife who wastes away after losing her cat, a prostitute raising money to build a church for the pastor she loves.

Warwick Prize 2020 · Shortlist

Abigail

Abigél

Magda Szabó · 53 when first published

Novel · 448 pages · Coming of age, War

Translated by Len Rix

AIAI-generated summary:In the autumn of 1943, Gina, the pampered daughter of General Vitay, is suddenly taken from her home and school in Budapest, without goodbyes, and placed in a strict girls' boarding school in the provincial town of Árkod.

Warwick Prize 2020 · Shortlist

Happiness, as Such

Caro Michele

Natalia Ginzburg · 57 when first published

Novel · 176 pages · Family

Translated by Minna Zallman Proctor

AIAI-generated summary:A mother no longer young writes letters to her son Michele, who lives far away and shares little of her outlook or her life; she holds a grudge against him, yet the letters are a tie she cannot cut.

Warwick Prize 2020 · Shortlist

Thirteen Months of Sunrise

13 شهراً من إشراق الشمس · 13 shahran min ishraq al-shams

Rania Mamoun · 30 when first published

Short stories · 80 pages

Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette

AIAI-generated summary:Stories of present-day Sudan: a young woman at her dying father's bedside, regretting a broken promise; a struggling writer combing the city for inspiration; a girl who collapses from hunger by the road and is saved by an unlikely rescuer.

Warwick Prize 2020 · Shortlist

Letters from Tove

Brev från Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson · 100 when first published

Nonfiction · 496 pages

Translated by Sarah Death

AIAI-generated summary:Previously unpublished letters from the 1930s to the 1980s, to the writer's family, to the philosopher and politician Atos Wirtanen, to her friend Vivica Bandler and to her partner Tuulikki Pietilä, many of them reports from summers on islands in the Pellinge archipelago.

Warwick Prize 2020 · Shortlist

White Horse

白马 · Bai ma

Yan Ge · 28 when first published

Novella · Family

Translated by Nicky Harman

AIAI-generated summary:In a residential compound in the 1990s, a mentally ill little girl watches the adults around her pursue secret love affairs, and tells, in her unreliable voice, of the lasting harm done to two young sisters.

Warwick Prize 2019 · Shortlist

Negative of a Group Photograph

نگاتیو یک عکس دسته جمعی · Negativ-e yek aks-e dastejami

Azita Ghahreman · 56 when first published

Poetry

Translated by Maura Dooley, Elhum Shakerifar

AIAI-generated summary:Poems from thirty years of writing follow the poet from girlhood in Iran's Khorasan region through the war years and the burning of books to a new life in Sweden, writing of grief, displacement and a woman's longing, and of a homeland transformed.

Warwick Prize 2019 · Shortlist

Katalin Street

Katalin utca

Magda Szabó · 52 when first published

Novel · 248 pages · Family, War

Translated by Len Rix

AIAI-generated summary:Three families live in neighbouring houses on a Budapest street, a dentist's, a teacher's with two daughters and an army major's with his son, and their children grow up together until crisis and war test each of them.

Warwick Prize 2019 · Shortlist

Disoriental

Désorientale

Négar Djavadi · 47 when first published

Novel · 320 pages · Family, Migration, Politics

Translated by Tina Kover

AIAI-generated summary:In a Paris hospital waiting room, a woman born in Tehran, who has spent her life keeping her country and family at arm's length, is overtaken by three generations of family history.

Also: National Book Award 2018 finalist

Warwick Prize 2019 · Shortlist

People in the Room

Personas en la sala

Norah Lange · 45 when first published

Novel · 200 pages

Translated by Charlotte Whittle

AIAI-generated summary:A young woman spends her afternoons at her window spying on three women across the street, sitting in their front room; watching them becomes an obsession, and each day she can hardly wait for the moment to begin.

Warwick Prize 2019 · Shortlist

Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead

Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych

Olga Tokarczuk · 47 when first published

Novel · 314 pages · Crime, Nature

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

AIAI-generated summary:In a remote mountain hamlet in the Kłodzko Valley, Janina Duszejko, an eccentric older woman who loves astrology and translates Blake, looks after her absent neighbours' houses until local hunters start dying.

Also: International Booker 2019 shortlist

Warwick Prize 2018 · Shortlist

River

Am Fluß

Esther Kinsky · 58 when first published

Novel · 359 pages · Nature

Translated by Iain Galbraith

AIAI-generated summary:A woman walks the margins of London along the River Lea, past disused works, run-down housing and patches of wild land, where her own memories and the area's history lie layered over each other.

Warwick Prize 2018 · Shortlist

The White Book

흰 · Huin

Han Kang · 46 when first published

Novel · 132 pages

Translated by Deborah Smith

AIAI-generated summary:One spring a writer resolves to set down everything white and begins with a list: swaddling bands, a newborn's gown, salt, snow, a shroud. Each item opens a short piece about something that can never be sullied.

Also: International Booker 2018 shortlist

Warwick Prize 2018 · Shortlist

Go, Went, Gone

Gehen, ging, gegangen

Jenny Erpenbeck · 48 when first published

Novel · 286 pages · Migration, Politics

Translated by Susan Bernofsky

AIAI-generated summary:Richard, a retired professor in Berlin, comes across African refugees protesting on Oranienplatz and decides to look for answers to his own questions about time, loss and legacy among these young men condemned to wait.

Also: Deutscher Buchpreis 2015 shortlist

Warwick Prize 2018 · Shortlist

Flights

Bieguni

Olga Tokarczuk · 45 when first published

Novel · 451 pages

Translated by Jennifer Croft

AIAI-generated summary:Fragments and stories about travel and travellers across places and centuries, from airports and hotels to the Moscow metro and a holiday in Croatia during which a man's wife and son vanish.

Also: International Booker 2018 ★ winner · National Book Award 2018 finalist · Nike 2008 ★ winner

Warwick Prize 2018 · Shortlist

The House with the Stained-Glass Window

Dom z witrażem

Żanna Słoniowska · 37 when first published

Novel · 272 pages · Love, Historical

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

AIAI-generated summary:In Lviv, a young woman meets Mikołaj, an older man, while trying to save a huge stained-glass window in an old tenement, and as their affair deepens he shows her a city of crumbling balconies and toppled Lenin statues.

Warwick Prize 2017 · Shortlist

The Coast Road

The Coast Road

Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh · 32 when first published

Poetry · 120 pages

Translated by Michael Coady, Peter Fallon, Tom French, Alan Gillis, Vona Groarke, John McAuliffe, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, Michelle O'Sullivan, Justin Quinn, Billy Ramsell, Peter Sirr, David Wheatley

AIAI-generated summary:Poems that blend dreams and dread, where banshees and pookas slip into a modern urban world, ranging from Galway and Harlem to Antarctica and imagined places, and returning again and again to language, translation and silence.

Warwick Prize 2017 · Shortlist

Clementine Loves Red

Klementyna lubi kolor czerwony

Krystyna Boglar · 39 when first published

Novel · 120 pages

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Zosia Krasodomska-Jones

AIAI-generated summary:One summer, a gang of children turns detective and follows a mysterious trail; to help a friend in trouble they sneak away from home while the grown-ups sleep and comb the woods by night as a storm breaks.

Warwick Prize 2017 · Shortlist

Swallow Summer

Schwalbensommer

Larissa Boehning · 32 when first published

Short stories · 144 pages

Translated by Lyn Marven

AIAI-generated summary:Stories of people around thirty, the disappointed children of Germany's start-up years, who drift between Rügen, Berlin, Tucson and Tel Aviv in search of something they cannot quite name: security, happiness, themselves.

Warwick Prize 2017 · Shortlist

Second-Hand Time

Время секонд хэнд · Vremya sekond khend

Svetlana Alexievich · 65 when first published

Nonfiction · 704 pages · Politics, Historical

Translated by Bela Shayevich

AIAI-generated summary:People from across the former Soviet Union speak about their lives before and after communism, in monologues the author recorded over many years of travel, asking what became of the Soviet human type once socialism was gone.

Warwick Prize 2017 · Shortlist

Swallowing Mercury

Guguły

Wioletta Greg · 40 when first published

Short stories · 115 pages · Coming of age, Autofiction

Translated by Eliza Marciniak

AIAI-generated summary:Wiolka grows up in Hektary, a small village in the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland in communist Poland, among school, beetle hunts, talks with her father, a mysterious seamstress and the wait for John Paul II's visit.

Also: Nike 2015 shortlist