Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Judges 2026
Arifa Akbar
Arifa Akbar is chief theatre critic for The Guardian. She was previously the literary editor of The Independentwhere she also served as a news reporter and arts correspondent. She has been head of content at publisher, Unbound, and arts editor at Tortoise Media. Her first book,Consumed: In Search of my Sister,was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards, PEN Ackerley Prize and Jhalak Prize, and long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize. Her second book,Wolf Moon: A Woman’s Journey into the Night, was published in July 2025 and was a BBC Radio Four ‘Book of the Week’. She has previously written for the literary pages of the Financial Times, the Observer and the London Evening Standard. She is a regular guest on BBC Radio Four’s flagship arts programme,Front RowandThe Arts Houron The World Service. She has judged the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Women’s Playwriting Prize, Costa Biography Prize, Baillie Gifford Prize and the Climate Fiction Prize, among others, and has guest curated at the Bath Literature Festival.She is a former trustee of English PEN and the Orwell Foundation, where she co-administered its book prize
Véronique Tadjo
Véronique Tadjo is an author, artist and scholar. Born in Paris, she grew up in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Most of her novels are translated into English and several other languages. She has lived in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, where she was Head of French and Francophone Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (2007-2015). Her novel, In the Company of Men (English translation of En compagnie des hommes), on the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and the South African National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences Award for Best Fiction in 2023. Her new title, Je remercie la nuit, was published in Montreal in 2024. She now shares her time between London, Paris and Abidjan.
Boyd Tonkin
Boyd Tonkin is a journalist, editor and writer who was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal in 2020 for outstanding service to literature over the course of a career. He currently writes on books and arts for international media including The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Guardian, The Spectator and Times Literary Supplement, and was formerly Literary Editor and Senior Writer at The Independent. He chaired the Man Booker International Prize 2016 and then served as the prize’s Special Adviser. Since 2017 he has been a judge of Warwick University’’s Women in Translation prize. He has served on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, and as a trustee of the Orwell Foundation. His reader’s guide to global fiction, The 100 Best Novels in Translation, is published by Galileo.