Babel: An Arcane History

"At the Nebula Awards in May, R.F. Kuang won the prize for the best novel for Babel , a dark academia fantasy set in an alternate Oxford University where the study of translation and magic are closely intertwined. It’s an ambitious act of world-building and functions as a powerful postcolonial parable. Perfect for fans of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell , or for those who have aged out of Harry Potter and are looking for something similar but a bit meatier. Lucy Caldwell won the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for These Days , a novel set during the Belfast Blitz, a series of four devastating major air raids on the Northern Irish city in 1941. The judges noted that “the juxtaposition of the horrific and mundane and the authenticity of detail makes this novel an exceptional study of the terrors and consequences of war.” Other shortlisted titles included Robert Harris’s Act of Oblivion , a story set in 17th-century New England, and Elizabeth Lowry’s The Chosen , a fictionalised account of Thomas Hardy’s marriage . George Dawes Green received the Crime Writers Association’s Gold Dagger award for his long-awaited fourth novel The Kingdoms of Savannah , a Southern Gothic mystery. “His prose is languid, even luxurious, but at critical moments of suspense, he pares it back to ramp up the terror,” said the New York Times. John Brownlow won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, a prize for the best thriller, for Agent Seventeen , a riveting suspense novel that will shortly be followed up in April with the publication of Agent Eighteen . The International Thriller Writers announced their annual awards in May. The title of ‘best hardback novel’ went to Sundial , a work of psychological horror from the author of The Last House on Needless Street , Catriona Ward. Sundial was also a finalist at the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards. Of course, there are only so many spots on shortlists and that means that many brilliant books are unfairly passed over. If you have a firm favourite from the 2023 class of fiction, why not drop us a line on social media to let us know? December 15, 2023. Updated: June 11, 2025 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."

"Well, I wasn’t sure this would be allowed. It’s a brilliant novel about an alt-reality Victorian England where translation has actual power. If you find these pairs of words that almost mean the same thing but not quite, you can inscribe them on silver bars, and they generate energy. These silver bars are used to power industry. So the British Empire is bringing linguists from all the colonised countries, from the most far-flung places, but then these linguists rebel. One of the things they do in the rebel stronghold is talk about how a great extinction event began on the day Christopher Columbus set foot in the new world. Since then, languages have been dying. Diversity of languages is essential to the running of this empire, but yet it is grinding them out. There was something so powerful in how, in this fantasy novel, in this unlikely setting, she captures something incredible about what we are losing. Obviously we are not trying to power our empire with silver bars, but we are losing a richness. There’s an amazing scene where all the rebel linguists are in Oxford. These people speak everything and love languages—they have mad combinations of languages that no one but a linguist would have learned. And that love of real, arcane languages has brought them together, and in fact is what makes them start a revolution. It’s a deceptively fun book. In linguistics there has been an anxiety about borrowing too many metaphors from the natural world. The linguists Aidan Pine and Mark Turin argued that, if you start talking about endangered languages in the way we talk about endangered species, it can imply an agentless process where it’s natural that things are dying out. But things don’t just die out. People don’t wake up one day and decide to speak a dominant language. There is usually a lot of violence and displacement in the stories of these languages becoming endangered. Certainly. I found writing the book incredibly emotional and difficult at times because I thought I was just going to write about language, but I ended up writing a lot more about the other things we let go of, or are taken away, and the decisions we do and don’t make about the culture we hang onto. So it became a bigger book, but I found the process of learning about what has been lost and what is being lost very connecting, very healing. I found this idea that I could be a ‘keeper.’ It really helped me, this idea, because I very fixated on being a speaker, on getting the language back as an adult. But, actually, if I can talk about the language and culture, and pass that on, that might be my role. And that might be worth doing."

"Yes! There’s such an original magical concept at the heart of this book. A silver bar is engraved with the ‘same’ word in two different languages. However, the translation can never be direct, and whatever is lost in translation is produced magically by the silver. For example, gardens can be made magically tranquil if the word in one language conveys this tranquillity, and the other word does not. The engraving must be done by a native speaker. The romance languages have been plundered for all they can offer at this stage, so Britain is looking for native speakers of other languages further afield, bringing them to work on silver in a prestigious department of Oxford University. So this fantasy device provides a neat, graspable stand-in for the extractive nature of empire, and puts the choice of perpetuation or rebellion in just a few people’s hands. Will you translate for Britain? Will you do so if the distribution is unjust, and worse injustices are being perpetuated? This is the dilemma facing our heroes. There’s a little band of them, so this gives scope for you as a reader to worry about everyone’s choices – the possibility of betrayal is real, as is the possibility of a violent end for any one of them. Yes, and at the same time it’s beautifully personal. You spend a lot of the book eating the delights of Oxford’s cafes and working late in student dorm rooms and admiring libraries. You want our heroes to just be allowed to ignore the wider problems, and belong, and have a nice time. And that’s the whole dilemma."

"A great book! I always say that when I finished it, I felt smarter. It is set in a real-world city, Oxford, and what’s supposed to be Oxford University. But in this Oxford University, there’s magic involved – so you don’t just learn the arts and Classics and everything else, you also learn the art of magic. But it’s being used to prop up England’s colonial power. It’s like something right out of Edward Saïd’s Orientalism : institutional centres of learning being used to prop up colonialism—quite literally here with power. “In historical fantasy, magic may take the place of technology, or it may enhance it” It follows the story of a young man who is brought to Oxford from China. He is brought there to learn this magic, along with several other people from various backgrounds from around the British Empire , all brought in to use their powers to further the Empire. Over time, he begins to turn against this. It turns into this beautifully written anti-colonial narrative that’s also imbued heavily with magic, as well as people’s interpersonal relationships, and then the history of the time – the British in China and the Opium Wars and everything else. It’s really well done. A bit of both! In colonial resource extraction, they would go into places in Africa and the Empire, and they would build roads and only use them to take things out. Here, we have them literally using the power of peoples from those empires. It gives them a small stake within it, even though they’re furthering the power of the empire. And it was interesting to see what happens when someone turns against that. It’s not a romantic notion of revolution, either. It’s the real gritty this-is-what-could-happen version. Not our dreamy idea that revolution will just happen and then everything will be fine. It’s all the unintended consequences and the sacrifices that have to be made, and the uncertainty at the end that anyone has won. I think the book really captures so much of that very well. And so clearly! I felt like I’d been to Oxford when I finished it. Kuang is really thinking about these issues of colonialism in history, and then finding ways to talk about it through the lens of this fantasy, which I think draws in a lot of people who may not have known about this history before."

"Kuang previously won the Astounding award for Best New Writer – not technically a Hugo, but presented at the same ceremony – and her novel Babel has already won a 2022 Nebula award. Set in an alternate 1830s Oxford, it tracks several real historical events, but makes one elegant magical substitution: the source of the British Empire’s economic power. In this world, Oxford makes Britain rich through the production of silver magic. A silver bar is inscribed with the same word in two languages, and what is lost in translation is magically produced by the bar. As the conceptual gaps close up between European languages, more distant languages are badly needed. But there’s a catch: the magic can only be worked by a native speaker. This conceit allows Kuang to sharply clarify relationships of extraction, co-option and complicity. Four linguists are welcomed into the hallowed halls of Oxford. Their linguistic skills are directly required for the magic at the heart of the Empire’s power. The Empire is extractive: the benefits of the magic are not extended to the countries it relies on. What are our young linguists to do? We follow an orphan from Canton, Robin Swift. However, we are equally invested in his cohort, each of whom has a different experience and a different set of temptations and fears. The result is a very genuine tension: it is unlikely everyone will make it out both physically and morally intact, and the multiple possible dangers keep you reading on high alert. A thoughtful, intense read."