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Women in Translation in the News

Judging Panel 2025

We are delighted to welcome Véronique Tadjo to the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation judging panel in 2025.

Véronique 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,Inthe Company of Men(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.

Véronique joins Boyd Tonkin and Susan Bassnett on the judging panel in 2025. We are incredibly grateful to Amanda Hopkinson, who steps down from the judging panel, for all her work on and commitment to the prize.

Lists of Submissions 2017-2025

We are pleased to publish the list of eligible entries to the 2025 prizeLink opens in a new window, for use by translators, publishers, bookshops, cultural organisations and researchers, and in order to promote the cause of women in translation more generally. The 2025 prize has received 146 entries from 34 languages.

For previous submissions to the prize, see lists of eligible titles submitted in 2024Link opens in a new window, 2023Link opens in a new window, 2022Link opens in a new window, 2021Link opens in a new window, 2020Link opens in a new window, 2019Link opens in a new window, 2018Link opens in a new window, and 2017.Link opens in a new window

2023: The Changing Landscape for Women in Translation

The prize received a record 153 submissions in 2023, a significant increase from the 58 submissions received in 2017. These articles discuss how the publishing landscape has changed since the beginning of Women in Translation month in 2015 and the establishment of the prize in 2017:

The Visual Success of Women in Translation MonthLink opens in a new window, by Chad Post

Generation TF: Who Is Really Reading Translated Fiction in the UK?Link opens in a new window, a report by the Booker Prize Foundation

Women in Translation: How to Read the WorldLink opens in a new window, by Helen Vassallo

2017: Launch of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation

The prize launched in 2017 with the aim of addressing the gender imbalance in translated literature and increasing the number of international women’s voices accessible to a British and Irish readership.

Three years in the making, The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation was the product of a collaboration between the School of Modern Languages and Cultures and the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and is sponsored through the university’s Connecting Cultures Global Research Priority.

Read our 2017 press release about the launch of the prize in: English, Catalan, Chinese, French, Galician, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

2017: The State of Play

A report by Nielsen Book showed that in 2015 translated literary fiction made up only 3.5% of the literary fiction titles published in the UK, but accounted for 7% of the volume of sales. If translated literature as a whole was underrepresented on the British book market, then women’s voices in translation were even more peripheral. The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, for example, was awarded 21 times, but was won by a woman only twice.

Here are some of the articles and blog posts that drew attention to the gender imbalance in literature translated into English in the year that the prize was established.

How English readers miss out on foreign women writersLink opens in a new window, by Sian Cain

10 female translators on the work that inspires themLink opens in a new window, interviews by Alison Flood

Where are the women in translation?Link opens in a new window, by Alison Anderson

Briefing notes: Where are the women in translation?Link opens in a new window, by Sophie Mayer

Let's have a year of publishing only women - a provocationLink opens in a new window, by Kamila Shamsie

And Other Stories to take part in Year of Publishing Women 2018Link opens in a new window

A women's prize for translated booksLink opens in a new window, by Katy Derbyshire

Why we need a prize for women in translationLink opens in a new window, by Susan Bernofsky

And the prize for women in Arabic translation goes to ... no one?Link opens in a new window, by Elisabeth Jaquette

Women in translation, part I: Fourteen countriesLink opens in a new window, by Chad Post

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