Authors and translators shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025 and 2026 tell us about the books they loved when they were young
With submissions for the first-ever Children’s Booker Prize now open – and our UK-wide competition to find three child judges underway – we asked authors and translators shortlisted for the International Booker in 2025 and 2026 to tell us about the books that ignited their love of reading when they were children. Here’s what they said.
The first novel I read in my childhood was The Sea-Hawk from Rafael Sabatini, an adventurous saga which revealed to me the infinitely powerful world of imagination. Reading it as a child, it dawned on me that books were a way to experience ‘visions’ – to see people and places that didn’t exist, but took me on a journey nonetheless.
That book became a parallel world for me. A world I could visit whenever I wanted, where I could be whoever I wanted. Holding the book in my hands, even without opening it and reading it, I had the feeling of peacefulness.
I feel the same now too. I keep a pile of books on my bedside table, and every night, even when I am too tired to read, the feeling of having them there fills me with peace, like I can fall asleep because my book-guardians will watch over me.
When I think of the books of my childhood, I think of Charlie Chaplin’s My Autobiography, in Vesselin Izmirliev’s Bulgarian translation. I think of Elin Pelin’s Ian Bibian in the original Bulgarian and Erich Kästner’s Das doppelte Lottchen and Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, in Vera Gancheva’s beautiful Bulgarian translation from Swedish.
But I also remember my parents’ books, many of which had also travelled: the red leather–bound Dumas volumes in our bookcase, not in French or Bulgarian, but in Russian. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago – smuggled in from Russia by a neighbour. Yesenin in Russian. Wodehouse in Bulgarian. Chudomir in the original Bulgarian. We couldn’t really leave Bulgaria in the 1980s but the whole world was right there in our living room.
Dragon Ball by Akira Toriyama. Its serialisation began in 1984, the year I was born, and concluded when I was 11 – a total of 42 collected volumes. It’s a work that showed me how to read and how to create stories. It was the starting point for me in my resolve to become a creative.
I wasn’t fluent in English until I was about 11 years old, and one of the first English chapter books that I managed to read on my own was Matilda by Roald Dahl. As a child who only had books to compensate for my little flimsy limbs that inevitably failed me in gym class, Matilda’s adventures were both gratifying and encouraging. And funny!
The first book I remember reading as a child that had a huge impact on me was a short story about a girl who lived in a small village with her grandfather. It hadn’t rained for a long time and everyone was suffering because of it. Until one day, the rain finally came. The girl danced happily in the rain, but then death took her grandfather. I was utterly devastated. It was such a sad tale. I don’t remember the name of that story. But it was a beautifully illustrated hardcover book. Strangely, I started to enjoy the act of reading after the experience that this book gave me.
The crucial three for me were Harriet the Spy, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Anne of Green Gables. Although very different in style and substance, they were all books in which a girl is possessed of a curiosity that exceeds all boundaries, making her behave badly but also ultimately saving her. I grew up in a Canadian suburb that I thought colourless, and so when I encountered any eccentric or unusual or passionate personality or incident, it quenched a thirst in me. Within that world, these books were some of my dearest friends and certainly my beacons.
From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konignsburg, Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Sea Hawk by Rafael Sabatini, My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin, Ian Bibian by Elin Pelin, Das Doppelte Lottchen by Erich Kästner
Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story opened the door. It wasn’t just escapism; it was the first time I felt a book thinking about itself – about storytelling as a place you can enter, and get lost in, and come back from changed. Soon after came Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which I have probably re-read more than any other book. What was special about both, for me, was their seriousness about the invented world: the sense that imagination is not the opposite of reality, but one of its instruments.
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. What I loved was that the excitement is mostly verbal: stratagems, persuasion, people trying to talk their way through problems that are bigger than any one of them. A scene – and, given the stakes of the stories, the future of the Galactic Empire – can turn on a line of dialogue, on someone reframing the situation, on a piece of reasoning that suddenly makes everything else fall into place. And the books don’t hold your hand; they trust you to keep up and reward you when you do. That feeling of having my intelligence and attentiveness taken seriously as a reader was electrifying.
When I was a child, at the start of every Christmas holiday I would borrow Little Women by Louisa May Alcott from the small public library in our town. It was only as an adult that I realised I could see myself in the novel, although you wouldn’t think it given the different historical and cultural backgrounds.
But I too grew up with sisters, in a household overshadowed by the absence of family members. Our circumstances were precarious, but despite it all we made things as nice as we could for ourselves. And like the March sisters, that was thanks to our own creativity, and to art. I didn’t consider that as a child, of course. I simply felt at home in that novel.
Two narrative poems by Richard Adams: ‘The Tyger Voyage’, illustrated by Nicola Bayley, and ‘The Ship’s Cat’, illustrated by Allan Aldridge. I bought this one again recently for the pictures, which are compositionally very striking and filled with fantastic detail, but it was the rhythm of the language and the clever rhymes that captured my imagination as a child. In ‘The Tyger Voyage’, no one seems bothered by the fact that the narrator’s neighbours are tigers; they just worry about them going to sea in a flimsy boat, and I like the acceptance of difference implicit there.
James Thurber’s The Thirteen Clocks. Wonderful language, images that immediately imprinted themselves on my mind – the bad guy with a monocle in one eye and a patch over the other, the tears that turn to diamonds and then back to tears after two weeks, and above all the terrifying monster known as the Todal: ‘It’s made of lip. It feels as if it has been dead at least a dozen days, but it moves about like monkeys and like shadows.’ That sentence still makes me shiver with delight.
Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren, Dragon Ball by Akira Toriyama, Matilda by Roald Dahl, The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Foundation by Isaac Asimov, The 13 Clocks by James Thurber
It wasn’t one book but a series: The Famous Five, in the French translations by Claude Voilier. Reading them was one of the great joys of my childhood. Naturally, I identified with Claude-Claudine (the French version of George-Georgina) who behaved like a boy and wanted to be given a boy’s name so that she would be treated like a boy. At 13, I wrote my ‘first novel’, The Clan of Eight, which was obviously a childish pastiche of The Famous Five. I even sent it to the publisher of the French series, who took the trouble to reply, very kindly telling me that it wasn’t good enough to publish, but encouraging me to continue writing.
The first book I can remember reading was The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. The first to make a powerful impression upon me was Peter Rabbit, followed by The Wind in the Willows and the adventures of Tintin; then, a little later, The Pilgrim’s Progress and Treasure Island.
Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. I read it over the course of a single day at 15 because it was referenced in a comic book – my only reading at the time. I remember feeling my pulse increasing while finishing ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ and thinking that if literature could do this – this spooky action at a distance in time and space, this guiding of dreams – I wanted it to be the centre of my life.
Reading as a child was all pleasure. I loved Spike Milligan’s Silly Verse for Kids, and I have a strong memory of a now out-of-print picture book called Mr. Bill and the Runaway Sausages that made me laugh and laugh. In the copy I now read to my children, my sister and I have written and crossed out ‘This book belongs to…’ several times.
I remember being delighted when books included characters called Sophie: The Tiger Who Came to Tea, The BFG, Dick King-Smith’s series Sophie Hits Six etc. Now I can see that this was an early expression of what, as a teenager, turned me on to the power of literature: reading poetry that seemed to have been written for me, that might not feature a Sophie, but absolutely spoke to my first intense experiences of falling in love, being dumped, travelling alone, being a Londoner etc. There was a lot of poetry in the house thanks to my mum, and now there is a lot in mine.
The Famous Five by Enid Blyton, Cat in the Hat Comes Back by Dr. Seuss, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe, Silly Verse for Kids by Spike Milligan, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
Greek myths, Norse myths, Arabian Nights, Journey to the West, Japanese myths – that’s what I would read over and over again. The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, too. It’s from these books that I learned that stories can have infinite depth.
When I was eight, I accidentally read part of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Boy did it scare me into learning more about the world.
My favourite book as a child was When Marnie Was There by Joan G. Robinson, about loneliness and friendship. A girl goes to stay in East Anglia to recover from an illness. Alone under a huge sky, over the long weeks of summer, she is befriended by a ghost girl. I loved the way I could experience and recognise both loneliness and its remedy through the process of reading and make-believe.
A Danish children’s book called The Blue-Eyed Pussy in English, which I first encountered in kindergarten. It is about a cat with blue eyes who is constantly told by the yellow-eyed cats that it is not a real cat, but in the end they have to admit that it is. A moral tale in seven chapters with a lot of repetition. I still know it by heart. It said ‘novel’ on the front – I remember asking my mother what a novel was, but I don’t remember her answer.
The first books that I clearly remember reading are The Hobbit and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I was seven at the time. I still have these books (my original copies) on my bookshelf and have returned to them again and again over the years. My dad fed me books – he realised that Penguin’s wonderful Puffin and Peacock lists were a guarantee of quality fiction for children and teenagers and would bring me bundles of them home from the bookshop. For me there was nothing better than a pile of new paperbacks.
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein, The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, When Marnie Was There by Joan. G. Robinson, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
