Living Canon

International Booker Prize 2010s: A decade of winners

The 2010s marked a transformative period for the International Booker Prize, the award that celebrates the finest works of fiction available in English translation. As readers worldwide grew increasingly hungry for voices beyond the Anglophone literary establishment, this decade saw the prize become a cultural bellwether—a place where truly global storytelling could break through and reach mainstream audiences. The award itself evolved in both prestige and reach, shedding its reputation as a specialist prize and becoming something that could genuinely shift what readers discovered at their local bookstores. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which won in 2016, was a watershed moment: a slim, unsettling Korean novel about bodily autonomy and refusal that seemed to ask the Western literary world whether it was ready to embrace radical, uncomfortable beauty from unfamiliar corners of the globe. The answer, resoundingly, was yes.

What followed in the late 2010s was a validation of that openness, as the prize embraced narratives from across continents and continents of experience. David Grossman’s A Horse Walks into a Bar, the 2017 winner, channeled decades of Israeli literary power into a searing monologue; Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights in 2018 shattered traditional narrative form with its wild, encyclopedic leaps; and Jokha al-Harthi’s Celestial Bodies in 2019 brought Omani voices into the international literary conversation for what many felt was far too late. Together, these works represented something crucial happening in world literature—a recognition that innovation, emotional depth, and formal experimentation were no longer the province of any single literary tradition. The International Booker Prize had become not just an award for translated fiction, but a mirror held up to what the world was actually reading and thinking about.

Below is the complete list of the decade’s winners.

2016

Translated Fiction

2017

Translated Fiction

2018

Translated Fiction

  • FlightsBieguni by Olga Tokarczuk

2019

Translated Fiction