Shortlist Internationaler Literaturpreis 2026

Prize for Contemporary Literatures in Translation

The shortlist for the 2026 edition of the Internationaler Literaturpreis has been finalized. Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) is glad to announce the titles, authors, and translators.

Shortlist 2026

Blutkreislauf 
Julia Cimafiejeva | translated from Belarusian by Tina Wünschmann 
edition.fotoTAPETA, 2025 

Oroppa 
Safae el Khannoussi | translated from Dutch by Stefanie Ochel 
Carl Hanser Verlag, 2026 

Eddos goldenes Lächeln 
Stella Gaitano | translated from Arabic by Larissa Bender 
Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2026 

Der brennende Garten 
V. V. Ganeshananthan | translated from English by Sophie Zeitz 
Tropen Verlag, 2025 

Das Gewicht der anderen
Bahram Moradi | translated from Farsi by Sarah Rauchfuß 
Wallstein Verlag, 2025 

Die Aussiedlung
András Visky | translated from Hungarian by Timea Tankó 
Suhrkamp Verlag, 2025 

More information: hkw.de/en/literaturpreis
Press photos: hkw.de/pressphotos

Jury statements

The state of emergency is not a temporary phenomenon. It is the norm of human existence. The books on this year’s shortlist tell six tales of its prevalence: about people falling out of our species, because falling out of our species is the history of our species. (...) These books are presented below. Their translation into German reminds us once again that falling out of our species is the same as falling into our species. And that the fragile idea of freedom only acquires dignity and meaning in the absence of freedom. 
—Senthuran Varatharajah

Blutkreislauf
Julia Cimafiejeva | translated from Belarusian by Tina Wünschmann 
edition.fotoTAPETA, 2025 

‘i weave my story out of rags, / out of tatters, out of scraps, out of lopsided patches of memory’—written in exile, Julia Cimafiejeva’s poem cycle is a formally open-ended project of memory that traces the history of her Belarusian family, stretching across a whole century from Belarus to Western Europe and Canada. Cimafiejeva uses various genres including letters, photographs, questionnaires, and prose poems to address experiences of forced labour, displacement, the Chornobyl disaster, and the stations of her own exile and linguistic deracination. She sews up the gaps in the story with ‘the needle of the poem’, rethreading trajectories over and over, interweaving times and places. However ‘worn out, ragged and faded’ memory may be—in Blutkreislauf, the Belarusian poet questions individual and collective memory of the twentieth century and makes a many-voiced stand against forgetting, sensitively and precisely translated by Tina Wünschmann. 
—Cia Rinne 

Oroppa
Safae el Khannoussi | translated from Dutch by Stefanie Ochel
Carl Hanser Verlag, 2026 

‘Nowhere in the ordered, dust-free archives of European memory’, we read in Safae el Khannoussi’s Oroppa, ‘was there any mention of this wonderous place which for years had been the subject of ominous allusions and nerve-wracking anecdotes’. The novel spins a web of characters and settings in which the paths of perpetrators and victims cross. From Amsterdam via Paris to Tunis and Casablanca, these paths lead back to the postcolonial era of ‘the years of lead’ in Morocco. Stefanie Ochel’s translation effortlessly recreates the sound of these narrative spaces. Oroppa makes its impact by defying conventional narrative logic. ‘It would be a shame’, writes the author in a letter, ‘to write a novel today while bowing to the tyranny of a plot’. With her book, she creates a narrative for the disenfranchised who would otherwise not be remembered on either side of the Mediterranean. 
—Maha El Hissy

Eddos goldenes Lächeln
Stella Gaitano | translated from Arabic by Larissa Bender
Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2026 

Eddos goldenes Lächeln is a many-layered, feminist portrait of survival and death in complex family constellations across multiple generations. In pointed terms, it outlines the links between civil war, flight, military dictatorship, and colonialism—by both European Christians and North Sudanese Muslims—highlighting their particular impact on South Sudanese women. Gaitano engages incisively with motherhood, between care, loss, and disquiet, also using her characters to critically examine patriarchal notions of maternity. Female pleasure appears in its own right, no longer tied to reproduction. The focus on smells lends the text an urgent, poetic language that gives shape to sensory perception. Influenced by South Sudanese oral traditions, Gaitano masterfully combines realism and myth. The German translation persuasively recreates this approach, in particular its rhythm and sound. In this way, the novel develops an impressive polyphony of different North and South Sudanese narrative modes that also shows how experiences of flight and violence alter language. 
—Melody Makeda Ledwon  

Der brennende Garten
V. V. Ganeshananthan | translated from English by Sophie Zeitz 
Tropen Verlag, 2025 

Der brennende Garten tells of the civil war in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, spanning the years until the war’s end in 2009. The young Tamil Sashi becomes a doctor, while two of her brothers and her friend K join the Tamil Tigers. The novel follows Sashi, her family and friends over several years marked by political upheavals and violence. The prose style is captivating, sticking close to the characters and exploring the scope for action in the ideological times of war. V. V. Ganeshananthan spent eighteen years writing the book. At the end of this long path stands a novel that does justice to historical complexity while also being gripping and moving. Sophie Zeitz’s rendering into German is so nimble that one forgets one is reading a translation.
—Paula Fürstenberg 

Das Gewicht der anderen
Bahram Moradi | translated from Farsi by Sarah Rauchfuß 
Wallstein Verlag, 2025

Das Gewicht der anderen is not a quiet book. The text begins, repeats, condenses, until every scene is stretched tight. Peyman, thirteen years old, is wrongly arrested two years after the Iranian Revolution. Here, prison is part of an order that is just taking shape—and with Peyman, perception itself is imprisoned. Sounds become menacing, light becomes a constraint, time loses its direction. Moradi’s language is physical, it falters, pushes, as if it were following the action in the same breath. Peyman’s experience does not end with his release, continuing and shifting into memory, into the body, into a life that will never be unburdened. The weight remains as something that inscribes itself and cannot be cast off. Sarah Rauchfuß’ translation holds the tension, the rhythm, and the density of the original without smoothing off its rough edges. Individual passages can prove disconcerting, especially where characters use racist language. But this friction does not diminish the work. The power of the text derives precisely from its intransigence. 
—Joy Denalane 

Die Aussiedlung
András Visky | translated from Hungarian by Timea Tankó 
Suhrkamp Verlag, 2025 

One rarely comes across books in which story and language merge into a higher whole as they do in András Visky’s novel Die Aussiedlung. After decades of searching, the author identified the fragment as the adequate form for the fate of his family in 1950s Romania (the father, an oppositional pastor, imprisoned, the mother deported to the Bărăgan Plain with her seven children). In 822 sentences without full stops, Visky transforms years of duress and deprivation ‘in the nothing of the camps’ into a hymn to love and freedom. A central role is played by the Bible (‘our only home’) from which the mother reads every day and whose fourfold scriptural meaning is given a fifth by the children’s imagination. ‘Everything stands and falls with the voice of silence’ says the 658th sentence. In Timea Tankó’s marvellously fluent translation, with its sure-footed rendering of tone, Die Aussiedlung resonates soundly, from the ‘clatter of bureaucratic jargon’ to the ‘silence between the heartbeats’. 
—Hannes Langendörfer 

** The quoted excerpts in the jury statements were translated into English by HKW editors for the purpose of this press release.

Reader

A reader with excerpts from the shortlisted works is now available for free from many bookstores in German speaking countries and at the HKW, as well as being distributed with the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. It is also available online at: hkw.de/en/literaturpreis.

Celebration of the Shortlist and Award Ceremony

The celebration of the shortlist and the award ceremony takes place at HKW on Friday, 3 July 2026. The authors, translators, and jury members present the nominated titles in readings and discussions. The winning duo will then be presented with their awards.

Fri., 3.7.
18:00–23:00
Celebration of the Shortlist and Award Ceremony
Free entry

The Prize

The Internationaler Literaturpreis: Prize for Contemporary Literatures in Translation (ILP) is awarded for the eighteenth time in 2026. It honours an outstanding work of contemporary international literature and its first translation into German. This dual focus makes it unique in the German award landscape.

The Internationaler Literaturpreis concentrates on heterogeneous forms of contemporary narration and focuses on the relationships between texts and realities as well as the dialogue between different cultures and languages. By focusing on translations, it aims to overcome national canonizations and limited understandings of the literary and thus takes into account the current conditions of literary creation in a world shaped by diverse cultural interdependencies.

The list of previous prizewinners is a testament to the richness of contemporary literature worldwide and to the productivity of literary translation in German-speaking countries.

Since 2023, German first translations of international poetry can also be submitted. The Internationaler Literaturpreis is endowed with 35,000 euros (20,000 euros for the author, 15,000 euros for the translator).

The Jury

This year’s jury for the Internationaler Literaturpreis consists of Joy Denalane, Maha El Hissy, Paula Fürstenberg, Hannes Langendörfer, Melody Makeda Ledwon, Cia Rinne, and Senthuran Varatharajah.

Partner

The Internationaler Literaturpreis is awarded by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and Stiftung Elementarteilchen (Hamburg).

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