English PEN was pleased when Ana Paula Maia and Padma Viswanathan were longlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize last month for On Earth as It Is Beneath. It’s fierce, bleak, and beautiful. It’s also a book we were proud to have supported through PEN Translates, our grant for new titles in translation from UK publishers, which has now awarded over £1m of funding to 400 books (including Charco Press’s previous title by Maia, Of Cattle and Men, translated by Zoë Perry).

For the fiction we support through the program, prize recognition is one of the buzzier measures of success. What happens after presses publish translated literature is interesting; the nature of translation publishing lead-times means we sometimes don’t see the impact of our funding until half a decade after we award it. But increasingly we’re also interested in what happens before acquisition, and interested in the international literature that never gets in front of Anglophone editors. Five years ago, in response, we launched PEN Presents, our translation samples grant funding the often-unpaid work of creating samples and showcasing them to UK publishers.

Unlike PEN Translates, which is open to work from any region, language, form and genre, each round of PEN Presents focuses on a particular set of languages, geographies or voices underrepresented in translated literature. The need for this work was proved when our first round in 2022, focusing on Indian literature in partnership with the British Council, received proposals from 13 languages. The value of it was proved first when all six of the projects we showcased were acquired by English-language publishers, and perhaps more comprehensively when one, Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, won the 2025 International Booker Prize.

We then partnered with the International Booker in 2024 for a round open to translators from the Global Majority. Datasets from both the Prize and PEN Translates told the same story: the representation of authors of the Global Majority is increasing, but translators from the Global Majority remain significantly underrepresented. This is long-term work, and it will continue.

Our latest round of PEN Presents, announced at this London Book Fair, focuses on Brazilian literature, again in partnership with the British Council. Ana Paula Maia’s books—their brilliance and their success—are a lodestar. But more work is needed. Maia’s two novels represent half of the titles from Brazil we’ve supported in the last five years; in that time, we’ve funded 21 projects from Central and South America translated from Spanish.

One of the issues we hope to address is that, while Latin American literature is booming, why is Brazilian literature translated at a lower rate, and whether the “boom” is a boom for indigenous writers and writers from immigrant communities?

A part of the answer is the relative lack of subvention and translation infrastructure for Brazilian writing. We know this from the research and consultation with colleagues in the region that shaped this round of PEN Presents, and from the submissions we received. The shortlisted titles are remarkable in their range. They’re from across the country—from the sertão and Roraima to Porto Alegre and the Argentinean border. Black, Indigenous, trans, queer and feminist writers and translators feature across the list. There’s poetry, political satire, romance. As ever, the work is there, and the sector just needs a little progressive and structural intervention.

We hope Maia and Viswanathan win the 2026 International Booker Prize. We also hope that a title from the shortlist of samples we announce on Thursday will win in 2027, or 2028, or 2029.

Nadia Saeed is the translation and international manager of English PEN