#IntYALitMonth: GLLI 2026 Shortlist: Beasts

Posted on by katieday

Today’s post comes to you from Tim Pruzinsky

More Than Monsters

Beasts – by Ingvild Bjerkeland / Translated from Norwegian by Rosie Hedger (Levine Querido/2025) – NORWAY

Beasts was unanimously shortlisted by the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative YA Translated Book Prize committee.  Its propulsive pacing and highly engaging reader experience made it a no-brainer for recognition. 

Coming in at only 118 pages, this book will fly off of your library shelves.  The plot revolves around thirteen year old Abdi and his five year old sister Alva.  They live in a remote area of Norway and when the beasts – these massive, sharp-clawed, and violent creatures full of rage – start invading and killing every human they come into contact with, the characters go on the run.  They are searching for a way to reach their dad who is stationed on a remote island before the beasts find them and tear them apart.     

Teen readers will want to know what happens to Abdi and Alva.  They will care about these characters and will furiously read to the end wondering if they will escape from these awful, remorseless creatures.  The beasts are genuinely frightening, but Bjerkeland shows how frightening humans can be in a crisis too.  

More sophisticated readers will start to question humanity and how we treat others, especially children, if and when a destructive force is unleashed on Earth.  There are also subtle hints at this being an allegory for what it means to be a migrant in times of war.  When read with that in mind, the story becomes so much more than escaping the beasts that want to kill every human in sight.  It becomes a story of survival for those with the least material resources and the least know-how in desperate times.    

Adult readers will also see echoes to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  While not as bleak or as sparse as McCarthy, Bjerkeland creates compelling characters who are trying to escape the horrors around them, all while revealing humanity’s ugly underbelly. 

But at the heart of Beasts is a story of a teen boy and his kid sister trying to live, to find their dad, to hope for a better future.   

It is that sophisticated – at once a story of survival that you can’t put down, but also a larger tale of what makes us human – that makes this such a great read.  Buy it.  Promote it.  Get it in the hands of reluctant readers for summer.  When the sequel drops in English, buy that too. 

Just make sure your teen readers can handle the horror Beasts unleashes.

TITLE: Beasts

AUTHOR: Ingvild Bjerkeland (b. 1981) has studied writing, and have now authored several books for children and teens. For her novel Beasts (2023) she won ARK’s Children’s Book Prize (2023), and earned nominations to the Nordic Council’s Children and Young People’s Literature Prize and The Avid Reader Award. (Via Norway publisher website). See her Instagram.

TRANSLATOR: Rosie Hedger was born in Scotland and completed her MA (Hons) in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh in 2010, leading her to embark upon a career in literary translation. Rosie’s work has been nominated for a range of prizes, including the Dublin Literary Award, Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2019, the Great Lakes Great Books Awards, the CWA Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger and the Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year, among others. Her translation of The Bird Tribunal by Agnes Ravatn received an an English PEN Translates Award and was adapted for BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime. Rosie has worked in schools, universities and libraries over the years, and has mentored emerging Norwegian translators through the National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translators Programme. (Via her website)

Several of her translations have been featured on GLLI over the years. See search results here, including Almost Autumn (2017) by Marianne Kaurin, which was an Honor Book for the 2020 GLLI Translated YA Book Prize.

PUBLISHER: Levine Querido, 2025. Originally published as Udyr by Cappelen Damm, 2023.

A sequel — Udyr – Ingen steder å gjemme seg [Nowhere to Hide] — was published in Norway in 2025.

ISBN: 9781646145133

PRIZES:

REVIEWS:

Tim Pruzinsky – Committee Member – is a high school English teacher at the American International School of Budapest where he passionately experiments in his classroom with implementing reading and writing workshop pedagogy within an IB framework.  He also teaches “The Imperfect Art of Living,” a Global Impact Diploma course.  Tim is a co-writer on the InThinking DP English A: Language and Literature website and is heavily involved with the IB as an examiner and workshop leader.  But most of all, Tim is determined – now more than ever in our AI saturated world – to turn teens into readers and if they are already readers, to nurture their love of books in high school. 

Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of GLLI.

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