Aficionado Award

The 2026 Aficionado Award goes to the global translation project Words Without Borders(opens in a new window) based in Brooklyn, New York.

Founded in 2003 by W. W. Norton Executive Editor Alane Mason and Spanish-to-English translator Samantha Schnee, who has been WWB’s board chair for the past decade, the digital magazine publishes international literature in English translation. It helps make literary voices from around the world more accessible, with a particular focus on Indigenous, endangered and otherwise overlooked languages.

The 2026 Aficionado Award thus also recognises the vital role played by translators in fostering international exchange and raising the profile of literary voices from different cultural and linguistic regions.

Lissie Jaquette, Executive Director of Words Without Borders, will accept the Aficionado Award on behalf of the organisation. The award ceremony will take place in October 2026 as part of the Frankfurter Buchmesse.

In a statement, the jury of the award praises the work of the magazine: Words Without Borders has spent over twenty years doing something simple but rare: making sure literature written outside English actually reaches readers who read in English. Its magazine introduced writers like Elena Ferrante, Olga Tokarczuk, and Jon Fosse long before they became household names, alongside hundreds of translators and authors working in indigenous, endangered, and otherwise overlooked languages. That commitment has never stayed confined to the page.  This prize recognizes an organization that has quietly and consistently expanded whose stories get told, and who gets to read them.

The Aficionado Award 2026 ceremony(opens in a new window), followed by a panel discussion, will take place on Thursday 8 October at 11.00 am at the Frankfurter Buchmesse.