2026 Prize

Kate Briggs is a translator, editor and writer based in Rotterdam, NL, where she co-runs the micro-press Short Pieces That Move! She is author of This Little Art (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), a long essay on the practice of translation, and Entertaining Ideas (Ma Bibliothèque, 2019). In 2021 she was awarded a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction.

As well as works by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, she is the translator of two novellas by Hélène Bessette, Lili is Crying (Fitzcarraldo Editions & New Directions, 2025) and Twenty Minutes of Silence (Fitzcarraldo Editions & New Directions, 2026). Her first novel, The Long Form (Fitzcarraldo Editions & Dorothy, a publishing project), was shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize in 2023.

Hari Kunzru is a novelist and essayist. He is the author of seven novels, including Gods Without Men, White Tears, Red Pill and Blue Ruin. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Harper’s and the New York Times. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at New York University.

David Sexton was Literary Editor of the London Evening Standard 1997-2020, a judge of the Booker Prize in 2005, and Critic of the Year in the Press Awards 2014. He currently reviews film for the New Statesman.

Francis Spufford (Chair of Judges) is the author of four novels. Golden Hill won the Costa First Novel Award, Light Perpetual was longlisted for the Booker, and Cahokia Jazz won the Sidewise Award for alternative history. The latest, Nonesuch, is a historical fantasy set during the Blitz.

He is Professor of Creative Writing at Goldsmiths.