Translated works make up half of shortlist for £25k British Academy Book Prize

The shortlist for the £25,000 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding has been revealed, with half of the nominated books in translation. 

The international prize, in its 10th year, rewards and celebrates the best works of non-fiction that have contributed to public understanding of world cultures. 

This year’s shortlist of six includes three translated books. In Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich (W H Allen), Harald Jähner, cultural journalist and former editor of Berliner Zeitung, explores life in Germany after the Second World War and asks how a nation recovers from Nazism. This "fascinating" and "ground-breaking" history of Germany’s mentality in the decade after the Second World War is translated by Shaun Whiteside. 

Marit Kapla, editor of a cultural magazine in Gothenburg, brings to life the stories of the 40 remaining residents of a remote village in Sweden in Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village (Allen Lane). Kapla’s engrossing debut book became an unexpected phenomenon in Sweden and is translated by Peter Graves. 

In When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold (And Other Stories), the Chilean novelist Alia Trabucco Zerán – who was shortlisted in 2019 for the Man Booker International Prize – analyses four homicides carried out by Chilean women over the course of the 20th century. The result of many years of research, this captivating work of narrative non-fiction not only examines the circumstances around the four killings but the reactions from society, the media and the men in power. It is translated by Sophie Hughes. 

Two books on the shortlist look at language and how we communicate. The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness (Scribe UK) by Katie Booth, who grew up in a mixed hearing / deaf family, is the result of more than a decade’s research. This "compelling" and "revelatory" biography of Alexander Graham Bell tells the dual stories of the invention of the telephone and how Bell became the enemy of the deaf community in his efforts to stamp out sign language in America. This is Booth’s first book. 

In Kingdom of Characters: A Tale of Language, Obsession and Genius in Modern China (Allen Lane), Jing Tsu, a professor of East Asian languages and literatures & comparative literature at Yale, combines meticulous research with a compelling narrative to tell the stories of the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese language to make it accessible to a globalised, digital world. 

Completing the shortlist is Horizons: A Global History of Science (Viking) in which James Poskett, associate professor in the History of Science & Technology at the University of Warwick, challenges the traditional Eurocentric narrative in a radical retelling of the history of science and celebrates scientists from Africa, America, Asia and the Pacific and the parts they played in this story. This is his first book for a general readership. 

Two of the books on the shortlist come from independent publishers: Scribe UK and And Other Stories. Penguin Random House has four titles from three imprints: Allen Lane, Viking, and W H Allen. 

Chair of this year’s jury, professor Patrick Wright, fellow of the British Academy, said: “This is the 10th year of the British Academy Book Prize, which now attracts many entries from across the humanities and social sciences, and includes books by journalists and independent writers as well as academics. Themes vary greatly and each book on this year’s shortlist greatly impressed the judges, not only for casting new and often quite unexpected light on an issue of global currency and importance, but its imaginative way of combining original research with a style and approach that is accessible to the non-specialist reader.” 

Wright is joined on the 2022 jury by professor Madawi Al-Rasheed FBA, visiting professor at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics; professor Catherine Hall FBA, professor emerita of modern British social and cultural history, and chair of the Centre for the Study of British Slave-ownership, Department of History, University College London; Fatima Manji, award-winning Channel 4 News broadcaster and journalist Philippe Sands QC FRSL, lawyer, academic and writer, University College London & Matrix Chambers. He is also president of English PEN. 

The winner of the £25,000 prize will be announced at an award ceremony on Wednesday 26th October. Last year’s winner was Sujit Sivasundaram for Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (William Collins).