First-ever Winners Announced for ‘PEN Presents x International Booker Prize’
SEPTEMBER 5, 2025 — English PEN and the Booker Prize Foundation today announced the six winners of the first-ever 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.
The new prize aims to “support translators from the Global Majority.”
The six winning titles were chosen from a shortlist of 12 projects and 13 translators; each were awarded grants to create samples of their proposed works.
Two of the inaugural six winning projects were books in Arabic: Ireme by Stella Gaitano, with a winning sample translation by Mayada Ibrahim and Najlaa Eltom; and Playing with Soldiers by Tariq Asrawi, with a winning sample translation by Anam Zafar.
World English rights are available for both.
Of Ireme, prize organizers write:
Set against Sudan’s history of civil wars, Ireme explores identity, family, and the unresolved past of a fractured nation. Ireme, the protagonist, is the daughter of a Southern mother and a Northern father, born in the South but raised far from her father’s roots. After her father’s death, she travels to Khartoum to find her family and understand herself.
Ireme offers a rare glimpse into the social and psychological impacts of Sudan’s civil war. The novel confronts the harsh realities of the country’s past while offering fragile hope through characters who seek the truth. Themes of alienation, belonging, and reconciliation are central to the story.
Judges add:
In her gripping second novel, Ireme, acclaimed South Sudanese author, Stella Gaitano, explores the profound effects of Sudan’s civil war on ordinary lives. Najlaa Eltom and Mayada Ibrahim’s graceful and sensitive translation captures the engaging style, emotional resonance and vivid imagery of the original Arabic text.
Of Playing with Soldiers, prize organizers write:
Ziyad and Tamim are 14-year-old boys living in Jenin, Palestine, under Israeli occupation. The friends enjoy the usual games – football, seven stones – but their favourite game is “playing with soldiers”. Bored one day, they decide to play their favourite game by leaving a “suspicious object” on the road (a radio wrapped in a plastic bag), hoping to cause havoc among the occupation soldiers for their entertainment.
But the plan never comes to fruition. As the boys are assembling their “suspicious object” they witness something that must be kept secret. This is a book about resistance, responsibility and the loss of innocence.
The judges add:
Resisting the urge to lead with misery and trauma, this story follows a group of lively young boys playing tricks on each other and Israeli soldiers alike. Though political resistance and various related threats are referenced, the story of the boys and the mystery they – and the author – succeed in hiding is key.
Achieving such powerful understatement in a work of literature set against the backdrop of the First Intifada is certainly a feat. Rather than drawing on a reader’s empathy, Asrawi creates a vivid landscape of life in 1980s Jenin, where the occupation is an integral part of the plot, but not its focus. We are drawn by the skilful characterisation of the young protagonists whose adventures lead them to become accidental witnesses to events that call for a level of maturity many young people growing up in a climate of conflict are forced to endure.
Zafar’s translation is fluid and fluent, faithful to the most important elements of the original text, in this case its brevity, “dark humour” and eloquent wit, through both a mastery of language and a keen eye on context and structure.
More, including an excerpt in Zafar’s translation, can be found at the English PEN website.
The other four winners were 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); and Tiffany Tsao for a translation from the Indonesian of The Born Out of Wedlock Club by Grace Tioso (Indonesia).
Information about all the books is available from English PEN.