“I Don’t Want To Read Everything From A Western Lens”: Dua Lipa On The Beauty Of Translated Fiction
The winner of the International Booker Prize is due to be announced on 21 May and anticipation is building in the literary world. The 2024 shortlist features novels and short story collections from six countries (Argentina, Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands, South Korea and Sweden) and translated from six languages. The prize celebrates the author and the translator equally, with the £50,000 prize money split between them, or divided equally between multiple translators.
The International Booker Prize has been putting authors from around the world on the map since 2005, and each year it grows bigger. This year, Booker has teamed up with Maison Valentino as its main sponsor, to give ‘the world’s best storytellers the broad cultural status they deserve’. Thanks to support from fashion house Valentino, and in collaboration with The Reading Agency charity, 500 sets of the International Booker Prize shortlisted reads will be sent to libraries across the UK, increasing access to the world’s best translated fiction.
Also lending her support this year is Service95 founder Dua Lipa, who, having grown up between Kosovo and London and being a fluent speaker of both English and Albanian, understands the power of language and translation in shaping our experience of the world. “I love all the initiatives the Booker Prize Foundation does, I have worked with them for a while now,” she says. “So, when the opportunity came up to do more work with them, I was really up for it.”
Dua also appears in a series of short films promoting the prize. Each film – produced by Merman, directed by Charlotte Hamblin and featuring actors Eleanor Tomlinson, Antonia Thomas and Tobias Menzies – features a monologue from one of the shortlisted books. “When I watched Jarvis Cocker do a reading of Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker at the Booker Prize in 2022, it stayed in my mind so much,” recalls Dua, who for this year’s International Prize reads a passage from Swedish author Ia Genberg’s novel The Details. “It was so impactful. I was excited at the opportunity of being involved in a similar way.”
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Dua believes Valentino’s support will help to boost the appeal of translated fiction to a broader audience. “I really think [Valentino’s] involvement will create an even wider platform for people who like to read books,” she says. “Books are one of the best things to keep in fashion – hopefully it will just keep people reading and make it something they aspire to do more of. It is so important.”
Data collected by the Booker Foundation shows that young people in the UK have already discovered the joy of translated writing, with 48% of buyers in this sector aged under 34 and Japanese fiction being the most popular. It’s hoped these numbers will continue to rise with the backing of influential brands and figures.
Perhaps most importantly, this year’s amplification of the International Booker showcases the power of translation in opening us up to global stories and ideas beyond our own experiences. “When I choose to read the fiction that I like, it’s always from a different world – somewhere I don’t [already] know about,” says Dua. “I don’t want to read everything from a Western lens.”
The International Booker Prize winner will be announced on 21 May. Find out more at thebookerprizes.com.
Pia Brynteson is Content Editor at Service95
