When the Booker Prize Award announced the shortlist for its 2026 international award, many LATAM bookworms got excited because Ana Paula Maia – Brazilian genre fiction author and screenwriter – got a nomination. She didn’t win, but her inclusion on the list is a big deal for Maia’s career and continues a promising trend.
If you’re unfamiliar, the Booker Prize for Fiction started recognizing authors in 1969, eventually becoming one of the most coveted prizes in literature, granting prestige and monetary rewards to even shortlisted writers – and their translators in the international category.
For the Booker’s first 35 years or so, authors had to be from the UK, Ireland, or the Commonwealth to be eligible. In 2005, the Booker premiered an international category, recognizing works translated into English, and in 2015, they changed the rules for their signature award, so any novel written in English became eligible.
By 2024, authors from Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Venezuela occupied most of the shortlist for the International Prize. Selva Almada, Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, Itamar Vieira Junior, and Gabriela Wiener all became international successes after their nominations.
That year, the award organizers talked about this “Latin American Invasion” at length, exploring why Latin American literature seems to be growing in popularity. Was it just more familiarity, made possible by more TV and film adaptations of LATAM literature? Or was it something about the translation process itself? Perhaps writers working in Spanish and Portuguese are more open to experimenting with language, form, and genre, an inclination that captures the attention of readers more used to English, which tends to be more formal and straightforward.
Regardless of why, it is undeniable that the Booker has been paying more attention to Latin American authors, and 2026 was no exception with the nomination of Ana Paula Maia’s 2017 novel On Earth As It Is Beneath It, translated by Padma Viswanathan, in the international category.
Ana Paula Maia is a Brazilian author and screenwriter, born in Nova Iguaçu in the state of Rio de Janeiro, a place surrounded by violence that would later show up in her stories. From an early age, Maia was fascinated by horror and western movies, and her memories of watching these films with her brother are deeply influential in her writing.
In her teen years, she stepped away from writing, joining a punk band as a drummer and later studying Computer and Social Science at university. But literature called to her again, and she published her first story in 2003, before she was even finished with her degree.
Throughout her twenty-plus-year career, Maia has published many short stories and novels. Revealing men at the edge of society, performing soul crushing jobs and looking for meaning in a devastated land are her trademarks.
In her nominated book, On Earth As It Is Beneath It, we get to know a land where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered. The state builds a penal colony in the wilderness to ‘rehabilitate” inmates, who can never leave. The novel opens decades later, as the operations are winding down. In the prison’s waning days, we see a new horror unleashed: every full-moon night, the inmates are released and the warden, armed with rifles, hunts them. Every prisoner plans his escape, not knowing if his end will come at the hands of a familiar face or from the unknown dangers beyond the prison walls.
Ana Paula Maia’s International Booker nomination is one more indication that LATAM culture has the ability to captivate wide audiences, just like art from anywhere else. And to win international attention, all it takes is good authors, good translators, and publishing houses willing to market the books the right way.
