site.bta"She Who Remains" by Rene Karabash Enters International Booker Prize Short List

The novel She Who Remains by Bulgarian writer Rene Karabash has been selected for the short list of the International Booker Prize, the organizers announced on the website of the prestigious literary award.

About She Who Remains, translated into English by Izidora Angel, the Booker jury noted: "An exquisitely written, brilliantly observed story about a young woman in a contemporary Albanian tribal society, and a blood feud that sets off her journey to self-discovery."

The 2026 short list was chosen by a jury chaired by British writer Natasha Brown. Joining her are writer and Oxford University mathematics professor Marcus du Sautoy, the previously short-listed translator Sophie Hughes, Kenyan writer and editor of the online magazine Lolwe, Troy Onyango, and Indian novelist and columnist Nilanjana S. Roy.

In addition to Karabash's She Who Remains, the short list includes The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, The Witch by Marie NDiaye, and Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi.

The selection is for the best work in a long fiction form or a collection of stories translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and/or Ireland between May 1, 2025, and April 30, 2026. The long list of 13 books was announced on February 24, chosen from 128 works.

The winner will be announced on May 19 at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London.

Rene Karabash (born Irena Ivanova) was born in 1989. She is a poet, writer, screenwriter, and playwright. She is the founder and organizer of the writers' academy "Rabbit Hole". For her novel She Who Remains she received the Bulgarian national literary award Elias Canetti, a nomination for Novel of the Year from the "13 Centuries of Bulgaria" National Endowment Fund, and the Peroto (Quill) literary award. The novel has been translated into 15 languages, with its Brazilian edition making it the first Bulgarian novel published in that South American country.

At the end of 2023, Marie Vrina-Nikolov won the French PEN Club Award for her French translation of She Who Remains. In the same year, the English translation by Izidora Angel was awarded the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation (in the United States), and in early 2025, it received the Heim Award from the American PEN Club. The novel has also been nominated for the Swedish literary award Prisma. She Who Remains was included in Service 95's list of the "21 Best Upcoming Books of 2026", the literary book club of performer Dua Lipa.

Rene Karabash's She Who Remains is the second Bulgarian novel to be included in the Booker short list, after Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel, which won the award in 2023.