There was a buzz in the room at this year’s International Booker prize ceremony in May, as some eye-opening – and encouraging – numbers were shared by the organisers. The figures, from a broad survey of book buyers, showed that sales of translated fiction increased 22% last year, compared to 2021 – and that it is most popular among readers under 35, who account for almost 50% of translated fiction sales. This is much higher than the 31% share of overall fiction sales bought by these readers – and the figures have grown year on year. For translated fiction, the future looks bright. So much so that in some cases books by certain publishers have become a “cultural accessory”. So how did it become cool, and which are the names to watch out for?
Undoubtedly the International Booker prize itself has boosted the profile of fiction from around the world published in English. Fiammetta Rocco has been the prize’s administrator from its launch as an annual award in 2016, and since then its winners have enjoyed enormous attention and sales boosts.
Last year’s winner, Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell, increased its sales from 500 copies before its nomination to 25,000 copies in the nine months after its win. (Not bad for a 624-page epic about a woman who won’t get out of bed.) And the first winner, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian in 2016, translated by Deborah Smith, about a Korean woman who begins to refuse society’s expectations in strange and unsettling ways, did even better, Rocco tells me. “This is a book that had sold 2,000 copies in Korean over 10 years,” she says. “It’s now sold half a million in English, and a lot more in Korean as a result.”
This is no coincidence. As Rocco points out, the intention was always for the International Booker prize to be more than just “a book award with a nice dinner. We always wanted it to have a bigger presence.” As a result, it has helped “writers [in translation] become more part of the mainstream”. And the success of the prize’s winners has helped correct the reputation of translated fiction “for kind of being difficult”.
Frank Wynne, whose translations of novels from French and Spanish have won many prizes, agrees. “Our generation [born in the 1960s] suffered from the notion that translated fiction was like castor oil: not very pleasant but probably good for you. And it shouldn’t be good for you, or bad for you, or anything else. What people are looking for is to engage with a book.”
Of the eight winners to date, six have come from independent publishers. Wynne is confident that “the huge contribution made by smaller publishers in the last 10 or 15 years” is part of the picture. Young editors and translators today are “in the vanguard”, as Rocco puts it. “They’re the scouts, they bring the stuff in.”
One of the most significant young publishers of translated fiction is Jacques Testard’s Fitzcarraldo Editions, which since its inception in 2014 has published one International Booker prize winner (Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft) and three Nobel literature laureates: Tokarczuk, Annie Ernaux and Svetlana Alexievich.
So what is Fitzcarraldo’s secret? “First and foremost, it’s literary quality,” says Testard. “Also, we exist on the margins; we have the luxury of being able to be interested when we want to be, rather than having to keep up with so-called hot books.” Reader loyalty is helped by the fact that this is “very much a publishing house that publishes authors rather than books”.
As to why its titles might appeal to younger readers: “We’re keen to publish books that engage with the contemporary world. There are obvious themes you can pull out of a lot of the fiction we publish” – he cites femicide in Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, translated by Sophie Hughes, and the occupation of Palestine in Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette – “that are pertinent to understanding the world we live in. Maybe that is resonating with younger readers.”
Testard thinks “Brexit is in there somewhere. It might not be a direct correlation. But lots of young people voted to stay in the EU. Maybe being interested in cultures outside the UK is cool.”
Stefan Tobler, the founder of Sheffield‑based independent publisher And Other Stories, agrees. The majority of the books he publishes are in translation, including Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches and shortlisted for this year’s International Booker prize. “Younger readers clearly don’t have the barriers and hangups of older readers, and that’s true about translation, queer writing or other previously marginalised authors,” he says. “It does feel like the desire to read beyond barriers is partly a movement against those Brexit barriers the older generations voted for.”
That is certainly true for one reader I spoke to. Grace Spencer, a recent English literature graduate currently working in France, identifies Brexit as a trigger point in her reading of translated fiction. “I don’t want to overpoliticise it – it’s also just about what you like to read in bed – but part of my attraction is to enact an open-mindedness to the international community. I was only 15 when the Brexit vote happened; I couldn’t vote and I found it very frustrating. A lot of [people my age] want to keep this international mindset open.”
Recommendations, she says, come from friends – and she gives them back too: “I’m very evangelical!” – but also from social media. “BookTok is a big one”, that is, the videos on TikTok where people talk about books. “There’ll be recommendation videos,” says Spencer, “if you liked this, you’ll like these, or [books] grouped together by language.” In a world of interconnectivity and infinite choice, the personal endorsements on social media are more effective than Amazon’s algorithms.
One of BookTok’s most enthusiastic users is Rachel Atkin from Sheffield, who shares her thoughts as@booksnpunks. Her TikTok account is a persuasive place. Recent videos include a rave for Alain Mabanckou’s African Psycho, translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley, a cover splash of “All the books I’ve rated 5 stars this year” (all but two of which are in translation) and a review of Roberto Bolaño’s epic masterpiece 2666, translated by Natasha Wimmer, which – TikTok being a short-form medium – is split into two parts.
Atkin emphasises the political nature of some translated fiction reading. With a particular interest in Latin American fiction, she says, “we’ve had a lot of people talking about political stuff in [South America], we’ve had Borges and García Márquez. Now we’ve got Mariana Enríquez talking about it, we’ve got Nona Fernández talking about the Pinochet regime.”
There seems to be a transgressive quality to some translated fiction. Is that appealing? “That genre of ‘messed-up’ books has just exploded on TikTok,” says Atkin. “There’s videos of ‘Five messed-up books you need to read’, ‘Five books that will freak you out’.” She gives the example of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, about a lonely woman who finds community in the striplit safety of a shop, until it unleashes a latent psychopathic streak. “Everyone talks about her book as being the most disgusting they’ve ever read. There’s an element of people wanting to read things that are pushing the boundaries.”
Speaking of Murata – or of Mieko Kawakami, whose novel Breasts and Eggs, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, is another favourite, and whose work is striking for its portrayal of women in modern society – it’s impossible to talk about translated fiction without considering Japanese fiction in particular. Rocco points out that young people “don’t seem to be reading the languages that were classically regarded as the drivers of the canon”, that is, western European languages. In fact, of the 2m books of translated fiction sold in Britain last year, she tells me, “the single most popular language – just under half a million volumes – was Japanese” (not including manga), “followed by South Korean”. (Anton Hur, a Booker-longlisted translator, recently wrote that after The Vegetarian won in 2016, “all of a sudden, Korean literature was seen as edgy and fierce”.)
Lucy North, an established translator of Japanese, is not surprised. Why does she think Japanese literature is so popular? “Japanese writers excel at short fiction. And it tends to be quiet and undramatic and often nonjudgmental. There’s a feeling of criticism and oppositionality in it, but it’s veiled. So there’s that, with a kind of mystery, that’s appealing to young readers.”
North says Murata’s Convenience Store Woman was a watershed, “after which lots of other women writers’ works started flowing in. It’s an amazing time to be a translator,” she adds. “Editors are much more open-minded than they were before.” Wynne agrees. “I remember an editor saying to me at a party: ‘What do you do?’ And I said I translate fiction. And he said: ‘Oh, we did a translation once. It didn’t work!’”
One publisher at the forefront of Japanese literature is Pushkin Press – owned and run since 2012 by Adam Freudenheim. Pushkin published David Diop’s 2021 International Booker prize winner At Night All Blood Is Black, translated by Anna Moschovakis, about a Senegalese soldier in the first world war and his descent into madness. Like Fitzcarraldo, it is small enough to follow its own taste – “We’re not just looking at the market and reacting to it,” says Freudenheim – so it tends to drive publishing patterns rather than follow them. Pushkin has been in the vanguard of the recent boom in Japanese literature, from locked-room crime such as Soji Shimada’s The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, translated by Ross and Shika Mackenzie, to its Japanese novella series including Kawakami’s Ms Ice Sandwich, translated by Louise Heal Kawai, launched in 2017 and about to begin a second run.
Freudenheim adds: “It’s an enormous country with a long-established literary tradition – Kawabata, Mishima, Tanizaki – [so] you already have that bedrock there. But there’s something quite strange and unusual about a lot of Japanese literature.” He points out that while a lot of its themes are related to western concerns, this is often seen through “a slightly different lens”, for example in the case of women’s rights.
This chimes with Rocco’s observation that younger readers are “very interested in the concerns of young women around the world. Not so much in a political sense, but more in terms of their personal experience.” Atkin agrees: she was “really happy” to see Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born, translated by Rosalind Harvey, about a woman who doesn’t want to have children, shortlisted for the International Booker. Another favourite is Cho Nam-joo’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, translated by Jamie Chang: “It talks about being a woman in the workplace, and sexual assault in the workplace,” she says.
Freudenheim is enthusiastic about the power of social media to bring younger readers to books. He points to Argentinian writer Agustina Bazterrica’s novel Tender Is the Flesh, translated by Sarah Moses, as “one of our most successful titles of the last couple of years. And that’s been driven by TikTok, first in America, then here. We didn’t make that happen, it was readers sharing it.” (Tender Is the Flesh, in which humans are farmed for food, fits firmly into what Atkin calls “messed-up books”. Another BookToker included it in a list titled “What the f*ck did I just read books”.)
But there’s another element to the appeal of some translated books. Instagram and TikTok are visual media, and the books that catch people’s eyes on the thumbnail of a scrolling feed are those with the most striking design. Curiously, though, the publisher of translated fiction with the greatest cachet among young readers is one that has given its books the plainest – yet most distinctive – look imaginable: the solid blue-and-white covers of Fitzcarraldo. The contents must stand up, of course: “I really like everything [they] publish,” Spencer says, while Atkin’s TikTok offers a video on where to start with Fitzcarraldo (Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced). But the austere designs do add a special quality: “The cover is so iconic now,” Spencer says, “and if you’ve got one on your Instagram photo of your picnic rug, it’s immediately a kind of cultural accessory.”
Rocco recalls seeing two graduate students at an event at the Southbank Centre in London for this year’s International Booker prize, “and they both had Fitzcarraldo books, which they were carrying around in these macramé bags so that you could see the blue cover. They were sort of totemic signs, a way of communicating to other people that you were ‘blue team’!” (Non-younger readers, like me, may recall a similar chic to Picador white spines in the 1980s.)
Of this already iconic design, Testard says: “We wanted to publish with a series look, and if you publish books of sufficient literary quality, you might get people following the press and picking up books without knowing who the author is.” He adds, however, that the coolness of Fitzcarraldo “is not going to make any difference whatsoever to what we do. Cultural fads are cyclical, [and] in three years’ time we might be out of fashion.” Fitzcarraldo, in other words, doesn’t lean into the aesthetic some of its readers celebrate (though as Testard acknowledges, “We do sell tote bags”). Tobler makes a similar point. “We choose according to what we love. We don’t publish according to market research. Hence we are one of the few publishers yet to make our fortune off a Japanese cat book, alas.”
Reading is about discovery, and reading outside your own culture challenges your view of the world – something young people are wired to do more readily than older readers. “Young people today,” Wynne suggests, “are less wary of the idea that a book is in translation. If it’s exciting, if it’s powerful, if it speaks to them, why wouldn’t they read it?”
“I think it comes down to the idea of reading against the grain,” Atkin says. “It always makes me so happy that I’m connecting with people around the world.”
Found in translation
Five authors to look out for
Mieko Kawakami (Japan)
Kawakami’s work encompasses the cute (Ms Ice Sandwich, about a boy’s obsession with a sales assistant) and the cutting, with All the Lovers in the Night, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, and Breasts and Eggs pointing the finger at social expectations of womanhood and femininity. Kawakami interviewed Haruki Murakami in 2017, challenging him about sexism in his work. Since then, a new generation of readers, hungry for a modern view of Japanese society, have made her the coolest Japanese cult author since Murakami himself.
Sang Young Park (South Korea)
Park’s funny, lively, affecting novel Love in the Big City, translated by Anton Hur, was a bestseller in Korea before being longlisted for the 2022 International Booker prize. It’s all about the love the narrator has experienced – for friends, for his mother, and for the men in his life – and about aspects of queer existence, from Kylie to HIV. Like any great book, Park’s work blends specificity with universality: “I would’ve thought it was an extremely Korean story,” he said, “but most of the reviews spoke as if the events had happened to them, which made me very happy.”
Samanta Schweblin (Argentina)
Schweblin, whose books have been translated by Megan McDowell, is one of a number of South American authors, including Mariana Enriquez and Agustina Bazterrica, who have made a name in English (and on TikTok) from stories of creepiness and disgust. (Just the title of her collection Mouthful of Birds is weirdly revolting.) Her novella Fever Dream is terrifying despite and because of the vagueness of the horror, while Little Eyes gives a nightmarish angle to robotic pets that aim to connect the lonely but enable users to spy on one another.
Benjamín Labatut (Chile)
Labatut’s mixed upbringing (the Netherlands, Argentina, Chile) is reflected in his work, which resists borders, allowing fiction to bleed into historical events, and follows a trend established for earlier generations by WG Sebald and Olga Tokarczuk. His breakout book, When We Cease to Understand the World, translated by Adrian Nathan West, is about the proximity of genius and madness, incorporating great discoveries and terrifying consequences, from cyanide to black holes: a metaphorical novel about nature’s revenge on human intervention.
Dorothy Tse (Hong Kong)
Owlish, Tse’s debut novel, and her breakthrough book in English, translated by Natascha Bruce, takes influences from Rushdie to Calvino, from Kafka to Carroll, and chucks them in the blender. It’s a freewheeling, invigorating performance – “a wild ride”, wrote one Bookstagram reader – about a professor named Q who falls for a mechanical ballerina. Beneath the strangeness there’s an exploration of life under repression – “to love the impossible is a form of protest” – which makes Tse’s work both contemporary and timeless.
Édouard Louis (France)
At the age of 30, Édouard Louis is already well established, having made his name with his debut novel The End of Eddy at the age of 21, which sold 300,000 copies in its first year. His novels tend to be autobiographical: Eddy is about his upbringing amid racism, violence and homophobia; A Woman’s Battles and Transformations is about the “destroyed” first 20 years of his mother’s adulthood. Louis’s work is hard to read at times, but impossible not to admire.
