Mayada Ibrahim and Najlaa Eltom won one of the six PEN Presents x International Booker Prize grants on Friday, September 5, 2025.
Submissions to English PEN’s PEN Translates programme and the International Booker Prize have told the same story since 2016: while the representation of authors of the Global Majority is increasing, translators from the Global Majority remain significantly underrepresented. PEN Presents x International Booker Prize was launched to address this disparity by funding and promoting the work of Global Majority translators so that more literature in translation, created by more people, reaches English-language readers in 2024.
The six winners for 2025 were chosen from a shortlist of 12 samples, by a cross-sector panel of seven experts, chaired by Preti Taneja, writer, Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and English PEN Translation Advisory Co-chair. She was joined by Safae El-Ouahabi, Associate at RCW; Elisabeth Jaquette, translator from the Arabic and Executive Director of Words Without Borders; Željka Marošević, Editorial Director at Jonathan Cape; Nii Ayikwei Parkes, writer, editor and Director at flipped eye publishing; Fiammetta Rocco, Administrator of the International Booker Prize; and Shash Trevett, poet and translator from the Tamil. They announced the six projects from a shortlist of twelve that would be supported this year on Friday, September 5.
Preti Taneja, Chair of the selection panel and English PEN Translation Advisory Co-chair, said: ‘These samples showcase the very best of what the PEN Presents x International Booker Prize round aims to support. Bringing a range of expertise and with unanimous feeling, the panel and I are very proud to support these translators as their samples make their way into the Anglophone world.’
Fiammetta Rocco, Administrator of the International Booker Prize, said: ‘PEN Presents x International Booker Prize was born out of a joint desire to platform, fund and support the best fiction translators from the Global Majority, who are currently chronically underrepresented in the UK publishing landscape. ‘The translator of this year’s International Booker Prize winner, Heart Lamp, Deepa Bhasthi, was both the first working from Kannada – a major language spoken by an estimated 65 million people – and the first translator from the Global Majority to win the prize. The short story collection, written by Indian activist and lawyer Banu Mushtaq, found its UK publisher after a translation sample was selected in an earlier round of PEN Presents, which highlights just how vital the programme is. ‘It’s exciting that so many of this inaugural cohort of talented winners – which include translators working from five languages and five regions – might bring a new readership to these works, with five of the authors of the showcase samples never having books translated into English and published in the UK before. We look forward to seeing what they do next.’
The winning translators include Mayada Ibrahim and Najlaa Eltom for a translation from the Arabic of Ireme by Stella Gaitano (Sudan). Ms Gaitano is the author of the short story collection Withered Flowers: Short Stories (2014) and the novel Edo’s Souls (2023).
Mayada Ibrahim is a literary translator, editor, and writer based in Queens, New York, with roots in Khartoum and London, who works between Arabic and English. Najlaa Eltom is a Sudanese writer, poet, and translator writing in Arabic, living in Sweden since 2012, who has translated short stories by other Sudanese literary writers into English.
These winning translators have received editorial support from English PEN and worked with experienced editors over the last month, and their samples are now available to read on the English PEN website. These projects will be promoted to publishers and commissioning editors in the UK and the wider Anglophone publishing landscape.
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