Whenever I open Twitter (or X?), my feed is wall-to-wall WIT Month. Tweets with pictures of books to read for WIT Month, links to articles about WIT Month and various sub-genre lists of books to read during WIT Month, general celebratory tweets in praise of Meytal Radzinski for founding WIT Month, announcements of WIT Month related events (seemingly a few a day), publisher promotions for their WIT titles, and tweets talking about how all the tweeter can talk about is WIT Month. The sheer volume of tweets and retweets and responses to earlier WIT Month is— it’s, it’s just �ɾ�����.��

It’s at the point that being on Twitter doesn’t even make me mad! WIT Month has, at least temporarily, washed away so much of the rage and insanity from my feed. It’s wonderful. If this is what the “death of Twitter” looks like, I’m on board.

Anyway, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who wouldn’t agree that, anecdotally at least,��Women in Translation Month has been a smashing success. It’s got such great online buzz. Presses pay attention and help promote it in a variety of ways. Bookstores and readers join in. The was inspired by WIT Month. Across all those metrics—word-of-mouth, raising awareness, getting attention for the cause and the books—WIT Month has been an unquestionable hit.

And, at least according to the data in the , this isn’t just anecdotal: there’s been a huge shift in the makeup of literature in translation since 2014.

Before sitting down to run the numbers and write this post, my sense was that there are more and more books by women coming out in translation all the time. Just within Open Letter, we’re publishing more women in translation than ever, what with three coming over the course of a year, the all-female Translator Triptychs from and , etc.

And, thanks to the , this is really easy to prove.

I started by looking at the number of works of fiction or poetry written by women published between 2008 and 2023, but on it’s own, these numbers are of limited interest. It is fun to see the huge jump between the number of translated works of fiction by women published in 2008 (only 63) and in 2016 (182 works by women), but between 2014 and 2021�� the numbers are pretty stable.

What’s really illuminating though—and kind of mind-blowing—is the clear and steady increase in the percentage of books written by women. In 2008, when we first started collecting data, 76% of all published works of fiction in translation were written by men. Only 22% by women. That’s a ����������������gap. Three out of every four translations were written by a man. Accessibility has a huge influence on what gets onto the shelves in bookstores, what gets reviews, which books dominate the general discourse, etc.

Looking at this chart, there’s no question that WIT Month has had a giant impact. In 2013, the year before WIT Month launched, only 26% of the works of translated fiction published were written by women. In 2022, that number was 47%.

A decade ago, it seemed inconceivable that there would be an almost equal percentage of books written by men and women coming out in translation in a given year. And yet . . . I’m truly astonished. To be able to see the impact of a program this clearly is incredible.

Kudos to Meytal and to everyone who has been supporting WITMonth over the past decade. It’s literally changed the shape of our reading culture for the better.

*

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be adding as many books as possible to the and doing some general clean up. So if you have a book that’s missing from the database and needs to be added, please fill out . Same if you see a listing with a typo or other error. Thanks for your help!

For anyone new to this blog, welcome!, the started in 2008 to track all books translated for the first time��into English and sold reliably in the US. (In other words: No retranslations or reissues of books previous available in ���Բ���English edition, and no UK-only titles that aren’t available via Ingram.) It started by tracking only fiction and poetry, but, with the move from being hosted here to over at��, we added on categories for nonfiction and children’s books. (Note: Still NOT tracking drama and graphic novels for various reasons.)

Up until March 2020, the Database was extremely reliable. Then, when COVID disrupted things a bit (remember that?), a lot of pub dates got shifted, I stopped receiving sample copies from all the publishers (more on that below), everything got a bit stressful, and I’ve never����ܾ��ٱ���caught up. I’ve been entering titles all the while—and updating records when I discover new pub dates—but I don’t feel like I’ve lived up to my own rigorous standards for completeness.

So, I’m turning to you for help. Attached below are spreadsheets detailing all the books in the Database, and then broken down by 2020-2023 (2023 being understandably sparse). If you are a publisher/translator/author/reader/data nerd/etc. and see or know of books that are missing, please add them . (You can also make corrections there!) I’ll make this part of the updating process—reviewing all the submitted titles—the number one priority this week, so that, fingers crossed, at this time next month, I’ll be able to publish a post breaking down the data with confidence and charts and stats.

In the meantime, here’s where I am (these are all Excel files): Complete Database, 2020,��2021,��2022, ���Ի���2023.

Thanks in advance for your ongoing support with this project, which is going to take center stage here at Three Percent again this year . . . And now—on to the random, fun stuff!

*

Last year was probably the weakest in terms of Three Percent content. Sure, we did a few seasons of the Two Month Review Podcast (get ready for Season 19 by buying !), and I made waves with a post crapping on Alejandro Zambra’s work (he reached out afterward, things are now chill) and god knows what else. But that might actually have been it! Not like I didn’t have ideas or occasional desires to write—writing here truly kept me sane and happy for years, it’s a blast digging into books and numbers, publishing tales and wacky analyses, and just trying to crack everyone up—but time . . . definitely not on my side. (If you subscribe to the , you’ll know why. And no, I didn’t really write consistently there, either.)

This year will be more productive—couldn’t get any worse!—and I want to start with a very classic sort of Three Percent post: Jamming together two fun things that have almost nothing to do with one another!

Below, you’ll find a bit of info on all the books that I’m using this spring in my World Literature & Translation class. (Which is my���ڲ����ǰ����ٱ���thing. It’s more fun than editing, than drinking with booksellers at Winter Institute, than answering emails, mailing review copies, or any of the other titillating activities of being a small press, nonprofit publisher.) With literally���DzԱ���exception, I have read none of these books. It’s what makes this class so fun to teach—we’re all encountering these texts, published within the past year, for the first time and taking the temperature of the sub-genre of “translation” with little to no extant analysis for a majority of the books. It’s a fucking thrill topped off by my insisting that the class, as a whole, unanimously like in a court of law, choose a single book to win the class’s “Best Translated Book Award.”

At the same time, I’m opening up my “tickler file” of good (and terrible) article ideas, and going to burn off a bunch of these that��I���ɾ���������I had written last year. So, in the vein of Marcel Benabou’s��, let’s have some fun looking back at what�����dzܱ���’������been.

(Special Note: All books referenced in this post can be found on .)

��by Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk (Deep Vellum)

One of Ukraine’s most beloved authors, a book Deep Vellum struggled to keep in stock thanks to war and , this book was a no-brainer for my class. There are two things we can dive into before even considering the book itself: 1) Americans are so much more interested in foreign literature from countries (well, European ones at least) that are at war, and 2) I read Kurkov’s first book, Death of a Penguin, when Harvill Secker published it in the early 2000s and passed on it. I didn’t care for the translation—which would mix dollars, rubles, pounds on the same page—and thought both conceit and execution were twee. (Again, if you, for whatever strange reason, are reading your first Chad Post post, I’m admittedly horrible at diplomacy and mincing words. And if you hang on long enough, this post is 1000% guaranteed to jump the rails.)

Given the current situation, Boris Dralyuk’s involvement, the general love this book has received . . . 2023 is a good year for second chances?

Unwritten Post:��The Continued Hiatus of the Best Translated Book Award

This would’ve been such a hand-wringing, self-involved article! The BTBA was my baby which, for years, was one of the biggest US-based awards for literature in translation. It gave out $20,000 a year in award money—to authors and translators, equally—it was open to all published translations, it didn’t have an entry fee, it was judged by readers and booksellers and authors and translators, it generated dozens of posts throughout the year, it highlighted no fewer than 35 titles in translation every iteration. But it was run on a shoestring and the semi-self-destructive will of a handful of individuals. There was no foundation really backing this; there was no support staff. Instead, for a pittance, 14 judges and a coordinator evaluated upward of 600 books a year, mostly in their “spare time.”

In 2020, we announced the last winner and decided to take a break. There were no books being mailed out, the world was teetering (although, let’s be honest: when is it not?), and getting people to willingly dedicate a year of their lives to reading books online? Well, that felt like a huge ask. Especially as the award money from the Amazon Literary Partnership program shrunk and I don’t know the US equivalent of the “Man Foundation.”

More importantly: What would set the BTBA apart from the National Book Award for Translated Literature, or the very well-heeled International Booker Prize? There’s so much overlap between the three, but those two are actual organizations, whereas BTBA ran on personal desire and volunteerism.

If we can find a rubric that would a) cut down on the number of eligible books, b) set us apart from NBA + Booker, and c) entice someone into funding this at $50,000 a year, we’re back in business. And I would like nothing more! I miss the excitement of this more than anyone realizes, but, echoing the core theme of this post: there’s only so much time, and only so much stress that any one person can endure.

by Vladimir Sorokin, translated from the Russian by Max Lawton (NYRB)

Is two too many Russian books for my class? Probably. Although given the scope of the joint Deep Vellum and NYRB Sorokin project—something like eight books over four years—we might as well dive in. Sorokin is the most obviously Male Author on my syllabus. He’s also one of the most recognizable, well-known post-USSR, Russian authors. He’s got the Karl Ove Knausgaard hair, a reputation for rebellion, and seemingly no doubts whatsoever about his literary experiments. It’s something to behold. I really love , wrote my personal favorite review ever about The Ice Trilogy, respect , and enjoyed all the rest. I’ve read them all so far, so why not this one?

Unwritten Post: “The Big Dumper”

Every day during the baseball playoffs, I wanted to come up with a crazy scheme by which I could write a post just to talk about Major League Baseball nicknames, of which, “Dick Mountain” (Rich Hill), and “The Big Dumper” (Cal Raleigh) are my two personal favorites. I didn’t know of the “Big Dumper” until this year’s playoffs (only surprise is that it isn’t the Dodgers promoting something that’s just this side of obscene, I mean, .) Supposedly, “Big Dumper” is because Raleigh’s ability to “hit clutch home runs,” but also because of his shapely, spherical, “big butt” (jealous!). Sportscasting is already fraught with semi-lewd terminology “look at him penetrate!,” “with a slow release like that, it’s easy to jump on his balls,” and “Big Dumper”—which may as well be something my four-year-old would call himself—only adds to that tightrope. Love it. Baseball names—especially from the early 1900s—and weirdo ballplayer nicknames reign supreme, I think we NEED to adopt this for authors and translators. Level up, y’all! Rodrigo “The Graphomaniac” Fresán. Will “Willsconsin” Vanderhyden. Kaija “Hedgehog” Straumanis. And so on! Instead of advocating for your name��to be on the cover, advocate for your moniker! If there’s one thing this field should embrace, it’s having fun just for the sake of fun.

��by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Open Letter)

Did you know that Elisa’s first Open Letter book,��Winter in Sokcho, acquired mid-2020, won the 2021 National Book Award for Translation? Couldn’t have happened to a greater couple of artists. This follow-up?—the one book on this list I’ve already read?—is as good if not better. And will be interesting to (re)read for it’s brevity and sparse prose that contrasts with the (male) books above.

Unwritten Post: Akimbo Books

Given that part of this story happened this week, I suppose this entry is a clinamen in my Oulipian rubric. But even so, there should’ve been at least one post on here about Rachel Crawford opening Akimbo Books in downtown Rochester. Rachel is a former student, contributor to Three Percent (especially for the Women’s World Cup of Literature), and book lover who, last April, finally realized her dream of owning a brick-and-mortar bookstore/community space, giving downtown the indie bookstore presence it has needed for years. We could’ve—should’ve—interviewed Rachel, cross-promoted the store on our site, done more events, offered her an additional platform to promote her work and the books she selected for the store.

Unfortunately, this is all in the past tense because the building housing caught fire last Wednesday and destroyed the entire store. It didn’t burn down, but everything inside was declared “unsalvageable” due to smoke damage. There’s a chance she might reopen, and she might be announcing a Go Fund Me in the future, but for now, if you want to help her out, you can order books (like all of the ones in this post!) via the .

��by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer (Seven Stories)

�����Ի���, actually. And because these particular editions are designed with the Nobel in mind. Looking back at the paratextual elements of the past four decades of Ernaux’s books in English translation will definitely be interesting. There’s also, actually, a Dalkey Archive story to tease out of this . . .

Unwritten Post:��The 2022 World Cup of Literature

Eight years ago. Eight! It was in 2014 that the Three Percent World Cup of Literature took place. An opportunity to use a silly rubric to highlight specific works from each of the 32 participating countries. Valeria Luiselli (representing Mexico) lost out to Roberto Bolaño (who “played” for Chile, but probably has more affinity with the Tiki-Taka of 2010 World Cup winners, Spain) in the finals, which, if I’m being real, would probably be reversed had ��gone up against����instead of����against��.

Pitting art against other art as if it were a sporting event is obviously a bit foolish given the subjective nature of the process. (See the annual Tournament of Books.) It’s only slightly better than a listicle from an intellectual standpoint. And yet, and yet . . . it’s kind of fun? And more engaging than a traditional book review?

Obviously, we can run back the Women’s World Cup of Literature this summer, but why not come up with various other contests and competitions throughout the year. Put all the Japanese translations from 2022 in a bracket and have interesting readers sing their various praises before putting it all to a public vote. Have a “Copa America” for 2023 books from South America. Pit five-book squads from various presses against one another. I mean, I’m actively participating in Eating Well’s “Souper Bowl” and voting daily for my favorite recipes which is, well, kind of sad. (Although it has expanded my repertoire and man, I’m getting hungry . . .)

by Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (New Directions)

This is a book that I’ve been meaning to read all year, but never got around to. Martin “Scandinavian Slayer” Aitken is a brilliant translator—and great guy—and this was one of those titles that seemed destined to win an award. Science-fiction elements, relatively short, by a young author—this one might make me a hit with my students. (Having assigned��Seiobo There Below��by Krasznahorkai years ago, I’ve become very conscious of including a few slam dunk crowd-pleasers.)

Unwritten Post: Is Patreon Just OnlyFans for Podcasters?

Think about it!

by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel (Liveright)��

Having worked on both��Natural Novel�����Ի���The Physics of Sorrow��(the latter of which was one of the best TMR seasons to date), I was��extremely��disappointed to be outbid for this book. In the end, it’s all cool—I want my authors and translators to��get paid—but I haven’t had the heart to read this in full . . . yet. (2023 is a good year for hatchet burying?) Angela Rodel is always a joy to talk with, and given the speculative, metaphorical nature of this book, it too could be a crowd pleaser.

Also: At the risk of catching shit from indie booksellers and everyone else (when am I not��at risk?), you can get the .

Unwritten Post: Favorite Books of 2022

So, I’m one of those people who keeps track of the books they read—I finished 84 last year—and usually love sifting through this list at the end of the year to write posts about “Funniest Books,” “Best Books by Women,” “Biggest Surprises,” etc., but of those 84 books, maybe a dozen weren’t work-related in one way or another. (And those dozen were all by Kate Atkinson and Sarah Moss.) I struggle to come up with ten translations from 2022 that didn’t come out from Open Letter or Dalkey.

Not to say that our books weren’t spectacular—I highly recommend ��by Carlos Maleno and ��by Lara Moreno—but a post tooting only our horn would be sadder than checking Instagram every morning to see which soups advanced in the “Souper Bowl.”

by Manuel Rivas, translated from the Galician by Jacob Rogers (Archipelago)

Rivas, probably the most well-known—and well-translated—of all Galician authors will be a good change of pace for my class. More classic and conventional than some of the others on the list. And besides, it’s a book about a bookstore and against greedy landlords—what could be better?

Unwritten Post: Spain As 2022 Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Bookfair

I did write something for the ��about Spain and the potential impact of Frankfurt on translations from Spain, but given the number of Spanish books we’ve published over the past couple years—not to mention the ones coming up—and the fact that so so many of our authors were in Frankfurt to give presentations, participate on panels, etc., there was ample opportunity to flood the blog with posts about untranslated Spanish authors, various trends, the new issue of��Granta on the various languages of Spain, and so much more.

I’ll make up for this a bit with a Mining the Dalkey Archive substack later this month (put Open Letter and Dalkey’s Spanish books together and woo-boy, we would CRUSH in the Publishers Cup of Spanish Translations), but so much more could have been done. Especially in relation to the business of publishing and the Translation Database.

by Fábio Zuker, translated from the Portuguese by Ezra E. Fitz (Milkweed)

Aside from the fact that climate change is��the��most important topic of our time, I selected this book because Milkweed sent me three or four review copies and, as with everything else, I never did anything with them. In fact, I have no idea��where��they are!

But that’s a story in its own right . . . Last month, I went into the office and someone had cleaned and organized EVERYTHING, including all the boxes of backstock, of “to be reviewed” review copies, etc. Who did this? NO IDEA. But my copies of��Life and Death of a Minke Whale��is somewhere in the Tetris-esque wall of books that a kind soul put together.

I am a bit leery of figuring out who this is though, since they also have been using our mini fridge and left a bag of Chipotle chips in there. Which is weird—who refrigerates chips??—and horrifying, given Chipotle’s status as being responsible for 99% off the E. coli outbreaks of the past decade. (This fact is NOT verified! Just a joke! Don’t sue me, just stop making everyone ill!)

Unwritten Post: Where Is Our Mail?

Speaking of unsolved campus mysteries, around May 2022, we suddenly stopped receiving mail at our office. It had been relatively slow in comparison to the BTBA heyday and pre-COVID mailing levels, but after working remotely for a full month, I came back to . . . nothing. Not only that, but I received notices that boxes were waiting for me to pick them up, but when I got to the post office in the union, they claimed they had been delivered—but they weren’t. Caroline Casey tried valiantly to get us the Charco books for our TMR, sending them multiple times, but nada, zip, zilch, zero. We will get four to six issues of��Publishers Weekly��some days, and books from Feminist Press and Other Press seem to make it through, but that’s it. I’ve talked to half-dozen employees and still have no leads. So if you want to get me a book for review, hit me up and I’ll give you my home address.

��by Shimon Adaf, translated from the Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan (Picador)

I picked this book for my class purely on the strength of Rachel Cordasco’s piece about the whole “Lost Detective Trilogy” for��.��And I quote:

SHIMON ADAF’S��Lost Detective Trilogy embodies many worlds, attitudes, genres, and voices. Like Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan, it contains multitudes. Philosophy, literary theory, immunology, temporal rifts, and religious texts mingle together in this trilogy to produce a work that attempts to mimic what Adaf believes is a deep truth: that people are not closed systems but nodes in a network of relationships. People are constantly exchanging bacteria and viruses with one another, their perceptions of time and space don’t line up, and one person’s individual trauma as a guinea pig in a concentration camp can be the portal to a major discovery about the nature of human consciousness.

Unwritten Post: Everything and Less

I referenced on the last episode of the Three Percent Podcast. (Last . . . but not forever? Stay tuned!), but never got a chance to write about it. It’s filled with interesting ideas about the impact Amazon has on contemporary fiction writing. (He puts forth an argument that it’s more influential that the MFA mill.) There’s data, examples, deep dives into genres like Romance that I’m not already familiar with, etc.

One of the claims I found most intriguing—and which ties into this choice for my class—was about how the trilogy is the new standard of American writing. Seems a bit odd at first, but when you look into writing that isn’t “pure literature” it starts to really come into focus. Science-fiction trilogies were totally my jam as a kid. And every monster porn I’ve ever come across is at��least��a trilogy if not a full-blown series. (Looking at you,��.)

by Ardengo Soffici, translated from the Italian by Olivia E. Sears (World Poetry)

Although I’m mostly lost at sea when it comes to poetry, I feel obligated to include at least one poetry title in my class every year. If I’m being honest, I know close to nothing about this book except that a) I like the cover, b) Matvei Yankelevich is running World Poetry, and c) Olivia Sears (founder and board president of the ) is fucking brilliant.

Unwritten Post: Penguin Random House Fails to Acquire Simon & Schuster

Given the extreme popularity of John “Don’t Call Me Mayer” Maher’s tweets about the DOJ vs. PRH court case, I’m glad I didn’t tread into these waters. But still . . . There were so many golden (by which I mean inane, insane, and rather stupid) quotes from various executives that would’ve been great fodder for Chad 1.0 (the mean-spirited version). —the Stephen King quote! comments on backlist! the belief that marketing is something only understood by Hogwarts graduates!—but here are a couple of John’s (since deleted) tweets.

DOJvPRH Day 3: Actual Jon Karp quote: “I’m not a game theorist, but….” Honestly, the man is hilarious. Asked if he has calculated Amazon’s market share: “I haven’t. I wish somebody would!” Govt isn’t taking the bait, but Karp is definitely pushing buttons.

— John Maher (@JohnHMaher)��

DOJvPRH Day 4: Sorry I’m taking so long, want to take just as diligent notes of the cross-exam. More ASAP. But here’s a fun tidbit in the interim. Dohle: “Everything is random in publishing. Success is random. Bestsellers are random. So that is why we are the Random House!”

— John Maher (@JohnHMaher)��

The first time I read that last one I groaned so hard I wished I could be a Big Dumper in the PRH lobby . . .

And with that filthy image, POST OUT! See you in a few weeks with overviews of some January titles and some other nonsense. In the meantime, tell everyone to input their titles into the Translation Database so that I can make statistics fun again.

This is my excuse for the not necessarily being 100% up to date for 2020.

There have been mitigating factors, obviously. I generally enter in books every week based on review copies and catalogs I receive in the .�� . . mail. WELL. Over the past six months, Open Letter has received maybe four bins of mail compared to the three we were receiving��each week��when lockdown started. I’ve entered in all the translations��PW��has reviewed, all (hopefully?) of the e-galleys that have been sent my way, and everything else I’ve come across. And I’ve approved for 2020 that people (thank you AmazonCrossing and Glagoslav) have entered in on their own.

Have I dug deep into new Japanese “light fiction” to make sure it’s all there? Well . . . no. I haven’t even done my quarterly review of Europa,�� Dalkey, AmazonCrossing, and Seagull.�� In other words, some things are probably missing. (This is probably the least effective way to ask all of the publishers, authors, and translators out there to , but here we are.)

I’m also not 100% sure I caught all the delays due to COVID, despite finding a decent number on .

All those caveats aside, 2020 isn’t looking so great in terms of new translations coming out. Like, we knew the election would railroad a lot of fiction publications, but this seems a bit more drastic.

Let’s take a quick look at the numbers through September!

In 2020, 276 works of fiction in translation will have been published by the end of this month, and 28 of poetry. (Which can’t possibly be right, right?) That’s 304 total titles, a 30% drop-off from 2019, which had 434 works coming out between January and the end of September—381 works of fiction and 53 of poetry.

A 30% decline is gulp worthy. Even given my belief that readership is more important than production, and that translation publishing may well be cyclical and in a bit of a corrective moment (costs have expanded due to better negotiating techniques by translators and more publishers vying for the same books)—still, not great.

Here’s a spreadsheet with all the titles—including children’s books and nonfiction—that I have for 2020 so far. Let me know what’s missing, because, really, fuck 2020, but a 30% decline seems extreme. (And a crappy way to kick off National Translation Month!)

Over the rest of the month, I’m going to be reading and writing about a number of titles coming out in September (there are 53 currently in the database) and writing/summarizing/digressing about many more. Part of this is a funk-breaking exercise, part of it is to get back to basics and give everyone new reasons to discover new translations. For long-time readers, these posts will likely be shorter and less theoretically fun, but we’ll see. I don’t actually know how to write—or at least don’t know how to plan my posts—so your guess is as good as mine as to what this will end up looking like.

I hope to upload spreadsheets compiling all the data from time to time, but for now, is where you can get the most up-to-date data about which titles are being published in translation for the first time ever in the U.S. ��(That link has a full explanation of the various criteria.)

Also, you can now add/correct information in the by entering the information in . It will not be corrected/added immediately, but I do work my way through all of these requests on a weekly basis.

Additionally, we’ve expanded our scope to include non-fiction and children’s books, so feel free to add any and all of those as well.

Finally, if you want to see the in action, be sure to read my weekly articles, which frequently combine data from the with commentary on one (or more) recently translated titles.

But again: If you’re researching translations in the U.S., y0u need to go .

I had to change the format a bit on this page, so nothing is as pretty as it could be, but have fun downloading all of this and pouring over the data. And letting me know what’s missing.

While I updated everything, I created a series of charts tracking all sorts of data about the most popular languages, countries, publishers, etc., etc. I would post some of that here, but I’m actually going to save it for a series of articles that will likely appear elsewhere and will include a lot more analysis.

But, since it’s Women in Translation Month, and since I posted some info about this already, I thought I’d share two charts.

First up is a chart with the percentage of books in translation written by men, women, or both (“both” indicating mixed gender writing teams and/or anthologies) over the period of 2008-2018. And yes, this is for the writer in the original language. The author who created the primary work.

Never really gets that close, unfortunately. In 2016 there’s a 30.01% difference between books originally written by men (63.82%) and those written by women (33.81%), but of the ten years tracked, there’s a 40%+ gap between these percentages for five of them. (The worst is 2008 in which 74.11% of the translations published were originally written by men and only 23.43% were originally written by women.)

In terms of raw numbers—and including all the updates sent in after my last post—there were 1,417 books written by women over this ten year period versus 3,351 by men. In terms of overall percentages, 28.97% were by women, 68.50% by men. This could be much closer to equal.

Then there’s the question of translators. In this case, women fare much much better.

See how those two lines converge in 2017? That’s because, as of this moment, women have translated 248 of the books published this year, and men have translated 249. So close! And a nice little bit of news for Women in Translation Month. Yes, there are still more men from around the world having their works translated into English, but more and more translation jobs are going to women.

There’s a lot more to say, but it’s late on Tuesday and I still need to pack . . . See you in a week or so!

¹ Poetry. Fiction. First time ever published in translation. No reprints. No new editions. Available in America. 2008 onwards. Cool? Cool.

To download the 2018 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2017 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2016 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2015 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2014 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2013 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2012 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2011 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2010 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2009 Translation Database, click here.

To download the 2008 Translation Database, click here.

First off, the big one: For the data I’ve collected between 2008-2018¹ only 28.7% of the translations in the database were written by women. That’s 1,394 titles out of a grand total of 4,849. That’s not great . . .

What are those 1,394 books? Click here and you can get the full list of all of them! Right now this Excel spreadsheet is sorted by Language, then Author Name, then Title, but you can do it by Year, Publisher, whatever you want. Go crazy with it! Publish excerpts for the countries/languages you’re most interested in. Use it to find out about books and authors you weren’t previously aware of. There’s a lot of data to mine there.

I could run a million of these reports, but I have some other work to do, so for now, I’ll leave off with two others: one organized by Country, one by Language and one by Publisher.

These results are a bit surprising, I think. First off, here’s a list of the ten countries that have produced the most total titles written by women.²

France 155
Germany 145
Sweden 84
Italy 64
Spain 64
Japan 62
Argentina 49
Russia 43
South Korea 39
Quebec 38

(Yes, I list Quebec as it’s own country, which probably is something that will bring down the Royal Mounties. But in my defense, this does capture every book translated into English by Canadian authors. So if you’re anti-Quebec, just replace that with “Canada”—it’s the same number.)

It’s interesting that there are so many books in translation by women from South Korea, yet there’s really only a couple of female Korean authors who are getting much play in the media or on Literary Twitter. (LitTwit? Kill me now.)

Obviously, certain languages are at a disadvantage when you look at their authors by country of origin, so here’s the top ten by language.

French 236
Spanish 186
German 185
Swedish 88
Italian 67
Japanese 60
Russian 46
Arabic 44
Korean 39
Norwegian 37

With all those Quebecois authors in tow, French really pulls away here. But Arabic coming in 8th? That was unexpected. Not terribly surprised about Swedish and Norwegian being on here, although keep an eye on Danish. That seems to be the hot language for women writers these days . . .

And, here are the top ten publishers.

AmazonCrossing 194
Dalkey Archive 58
Europa Editions 47
Seagull Books 37
Other Press 28
New Directions 26
Open Letter 24
Atria 19
Feminist Press 17
Penguin 17

Pretty similar to the list of the top ten overall publishers of translations, but still, pretty interesting. And wow, Amazon, wow.

Anyway, enjoy all the spreadsheets, all the data. And feel free to share any of this or to break it down in whatever way you want. I know there are a million other reports, and if there are one or two that a lot of people ask for, I’ll try and get to them later this week.

¹ We only track fiction and poetry (all genres, including young adult, but not kids books, not graphic novels, not drama, not nonfiction) that is published in translation for the first time ever during this period. No retranslations of unexpurgated texts. No reissues. Just new voices that had never before been available to English readers.

² This is different from the countries with the most female authors who have been translated. That would be really interesting as well, especially since some Scandinavian countries are probably getting a boost by having female authors who write crime series.

There are two big updates worth noting here, before getting into some of the breakdowns: 1) I added over 150 titles to the 2016 database, so this is starting to look a little bit more robust than last time, and 2) each of these lists the gender for the author and translator, along with reports breaking these down by percentage by fiction and poetry. (More on that below.)

First off, here are the general comparisons that seem most worthy to note¹:

Overall Number of Titles

         Fiction       Poetry     Total

2014    502          98           600
2015    478          91           569
2016    209          17           226

We can ignore 2016 for now—there are zero books currently listed for October, November, and December—but it’s worth pointing out that the total number of fiction and poetry translations published for the first time in 2015 dropped by 5% from the previous year. That’s not a huge number (31 titles), but it is the first time since 2010 that the figure has dropped. (2009 we logged in 360 titles, 2010 only 346. Since then we’ve gone up to 378, 459, 544, then 600. Percentage-wise, that’s pretty solid.)

In terms of the most-translated languages, French, German, and Spanish take up the top three spots in each of these reports. For 2014 and 2015, the order is French, German, Spanish, but so far in 2016, it’s French, Spanish, German.

Between 2014 and 2015, Chinese jumped from seventh overall to fifth, Russian fell from fifth to ninth, and Danish replaced Japanese, but other than that everything was pretty much the same as it has been for a few years. Italian came in fourth, with Arabic, Swedish, and Portuguese being the other languages that appeared in the top ten along with the aforementioned Russian, Danish, Chinese, and Japanese.

Publisher-wise, Amazon is still the main story. They did 46 books in 2014, 75 in 2015, and have announced 31 titles so far in 2016. (Just a note: Dalkey is above them so far this year, with 34 titles listed, but that includes titles they’ve announced through September 2016. By contrast, the Amazon titles are all from the first half of the year. In fact, 28 of the 31 are from January through April. It looks like they’re going to end up over 70 again.)

*

I suspect the data about the gender of authors and translators will be the most discussed part of these reports, so let me explain a bit first.

Over the past summer, a couple of my interns went through every record we have from 2008-2016 trying to figure out if the author and translator identified as “male” or “female.” Theoretically, we could/should expand this out into other gender categories, but this seemed like a relatively good starting point. We used author/translator bio pronouns to determine how to categorize all of the artists, with a few minor exceptions. If we absolutely couldn’t figure out if the artist was male or female we generally logged him/her as “Both” for the time being. (I can always change those later.) In a few instances, I don’t know who the translator is—those records are left blank. Also, if the book is an anthology containing pieces by men and women, or if a book has a translation team with men and women, it’s marked as “Both.”

If anyone is identified incorrectly on these spreadsheets, just let me know.

Here’s the general data, as I have it:

2014: 30.68% of fiction was by women (154 books, compared to 343 by men, and 5 by both), 36.73% of poetry was by women (36 to 59 to 3), meaning female authors made up 31.67% of the total (190 to 402 to 8).

2015: 29.50% of fiction was by women (141 to 325 to 12), 34.07% of poetry (31 to 54 to 6), and 30.23% overall (172 to 379 to 18).

2016: 33.01% of fiction was by women (69 to 134 to 6), 35.29% of poetry (6 to 11 to 0), and 33.19% overall (75 to 145 to 6).

In short, the percentage seems to be hovering around 31% total, which isn’t great.

Female translators fare slightly better, but only slightly.

In 2014, women translated 39.50% of the fiction and poetry published in English for the first time (237 books compared to 317 translated by men, 46 by both).

In 2015 that percentage went up to 43.74% (248 titles compared to 277 by men, 42 by both).

And so far 2016 is right in the middle: 40.89% (92 titles to 121 to 12).

This can be broken down by language, by publisher, by any number of things, and will be, once I find some more time. For now, download all of these, play around, send me corrections, and find some books that sound interesting to you.

¹ As always, here is my set of disclaimers: I only count works of fiction and poetry that have never before appeared in English translations. No new translations, no reissues, no manga, no creative nonfiction. Also, I do this by myself, so all mistakes and omissions are mine. Some might be justified, others might be related to how many hours exist in a week and how many jobs am I trying to do again? If you know of something that’s missing, let me know and I’ll either add it or explain why I’m not sure it counts. Also, send me your 2016 books, poetry people. These are always the hardest to find, but to have only 17 listed at this point in time? That’s just sad.

That post was a bit bleak, talking about a 15% reduction in the number of works of fiction and poetry published in 2015 when compared to 2014.¹

Since that went live, a lot of things happened. As always, I encourage people (publishers, translators, readers, booksellers, cultural organizations) to let me know if there are any missing titles. That happens regularly, although not all of the titles submitted actually turn out to be eligible. On Friday, the entire narrative changed.

In that initial post, I wrote about how the top ten publishers of translations—especially AmazonCrossing and Dalkey Archive—didn’t do as many books in 2015 as 2014, which explains a huge chunk of the decline. On Friday, a PR person for Amazon told me that I was missing a ton of AmazonCrossing titles. Eventually she sent me a list of all the books they published in 2015.²

Now, a few days later, the situation has changed dramatically. Let’s start with the basics:

According to the most current version of the database, in 2014, 600 works of fiction and poetry were published for the first time—502 works of fiction, 98 of poetry.

Right now, I’ve identified 549 titles that came out in 2015—468 works of fiction, 81 of poetry. That’s a drop off of 8.5%, which isn’t as bad at the previously reported 15%, but is still something.

Looking closer at 2014: 202 publishers brought out at least one new work of fiction or poetry in translation, and these titles were translated from 49 different languages and authors hailing from 73 different countries.

In 2015, only 151 presses brought out an eligible translation, with the books published being translated from 48 different languages by authors from 79 countries.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to investigate the 51 presses who fell off the list, and hopefully I’ll uncover a couple dozen more titles. For the sake of this post, I’m going to put that aside, since there’s no clear indication that I’m missing a(nother) huge chunk of books.

Let’s look closer at the publishers though, since that’s where things get interesting (in my opinion). Here are the top 10 publishers in 2014:

AmazonCrossing 46
Dalkey Archive 30
Seagull Books 21
Europa Editions 19
Gallic Books 16
Other Press 15
New Directions 13
K A Nitz 11
Atria 10
FSG 10

Those presses account for 191 titles, or 32% of all the counted titles.

Here’s 2015:

AmazonCrossing 75
Dalkey Archive 25
New Directions 20
Seagull Books 16
Atria 13
Gallic Books 13
Le French 11
Minotaur 10
Open Letter 10
Archipelago 9

These presses account for 202 titles, or 37% of the grand total.

But what obviously stands out is Amazon, sitting up there with 75 titles—three times more than the next press. Three times! They make up almost 14% of all the translations included on their own. That’s incredible.

So, why is there a decrease between these two years? From a cursory glance at these reports (I’ll do more later, when I’m not exhausted, half-sick, and watching football), it seems like fewer presses did translations in 2015, and the ones that usually do the most fell off just a bit. I’m not sure why . . . Might be because the market isn’t supporting a lot of the smaller presses that have been doing two or three translations a year, so they cut back to one or zero. I know Dalkey switched distributors and locations this year, which is obviously going to throw things off for a bit. Kerri Nitz told me that he had to slow down on his translation and publishing project this year because of a move. It happens. And hopefully this is just a fluctuation, not a trend.

But if there’s one thing that we could do to change this, it’s to buy more works of international literature and to get people who don’t usually read international lit to but one or two books. If all of these books sold an additional 250 copies on average, things would most certainly change. This is especially true of small, independent, nonprofit presses. If we sold 250 more copies of each of our books, I might actually be happy and less neurotic.

Also, without making too big of a deal out of it, I want to point out that it takes a lot of work to keep up this database. It’s not part of my official job, and it’s not something that we as an organization are obliged to maintain and share. But we do. For free. I spend most of my day working on this because I think it’s important for the literary community. And although I’m always tempted to lock it down and charge for access ($10 a year? $100 for institutions?), I can’t bring myself to do it.

Open Letter is a nonprofit, which means a few things to me. Most importantly, I think a nonprofit should do things to benefit culture as a whole. Yes, we need to sell books and reach as many readers as possible—it’s not like we can just do whatever we want and live off of donations. But I personally believe nonprofit presses should be doing some things that aren’t financially motivated. It could be offering internships to high school and college students. Giving away books to correctional facilities. Hosting free public workshops or bringing authors to communities that aren’t New York and don’t often have access to professional writers. Or, maybe, providing a database of international literature and trying to support the field as a whole. Nonprofits should be good literary citizens.

That said, we obviously need donations to survive. We don’t get nearly the amount that we need (no one ever does, I know), but for something like this, it would be great if literary patrons would consider to ensure that we can continue to publish and promote this database. It’s something I want to continue to do, for everyone, but a bit of financial support would go a long way.

¹ What I track in the database are all the works of fiction and poetry published in translation for the first time ever. Just to make sure there’s no confusion, I’m going to expand this footnote to explain that is and isn’t included. I don’t currently track non-fiction, graphic novels, manga, or children’s books. Just fiction and poetry. New translations (even if they’ve never been published before) of books previous available in an English translation are not included. If a collected poems comes out and more than half of the poems are available in other, previously published volumes, I don’t include it. All books in the database have ISBNs and/or are registered in WorldCat. They are available for sale in the U.S. through normal distribution methods (bookstores can order them), although the presses don’t have to be based here. The key: Fiction and poetry ONLY, and books that have never been available in any prior English translation.

This isn’t a reflection of ALL translations being published, since there are a significant number of new translations and reissues coming out every year. And a significant number of nonfiction books. (Probably.) Take it for what it is. If we got any money whatsoever for doing this, we might be able to expand it. But the situation being what it is—note that I just spend four hours on a Sunday working on it—I’m doing the best I can.

² I don’t want my musings/jokes to overrun the story above, so I’ll put them here. First off, the initial email from Amazon simply stated that my reporting was wrong. They were publishing 76 titles this year. (This wasn’t quite accurate—she missed a few titles and included a book of essays and one by an Australian originally written in English.) Without actually listing the titles [insert joke about Amazon not being great with sharing actual data], it was kind of hard to figure out what was missing, what had gone wrong.

I use two sources for info on what AmazonCrossing is publishing: a monthly email from their team with links to review copies, and this Maybe someone reading this will really “get” the Crossing site, but I don’t. It’s totally fine, but figuring out what books to add to the database requires clicking on those “new release” options on the left every 30 or 90 days, and checking all the titles there against what’s already been logged. There’s no quarterly catalog, no easy way to do this. And when they’re doing so many books, it’s quite a bit of work.

What’s weird to me, what I want to make fun of, is that I’ve sent updates of the database to over 200 publishers (including Amazon) on multiple occasions this year. That’s one of the ways I find out what’s missing. As recent as two weeks ago, Amazon said nothing about titles missing from the official list, although they did respond with submissions for the Best Translated Book Award. Which is fine, except that I feel like people in charge of PR should be doing PR for their books, such as by telling a website focused on international literature about the books they’re publishing. That would be nice. Because I can tell you, having gone through all of the titles they’ve published, I’ve seen almost no attention whatsoever for these books. I’ve been a long-time supporter of this particular aspect of Amazon, praising the fact that they’re doing the books other presses ignore (romance in translation, for example) and giving jobs to translators.

But it would be so much better if people were discussing these books! Sure, there aren’t many outlets reviewing translations at all, and I’m sure there’s a widespread bias against books coming out from Amazon, but I also don’t think they’re doing all that they can to get the word out within the existing community of people interested in international literature. (Although I want to point out that they do a great job working with ALTA and advertising at the annual conference.) Maybe they don’t need to, instead relying on direct marketing to readers. But I feel like more could be done, and it’s sort of unfair to some of these books. (Like Bae Suah’s Nowhere to Be Found.)

Basically, what I really want is a PDF catalog describing all of their titles. It would make my life easier and I am selfish.

This is one of the free services Three Percent provides as a nonprofit organization, and which I work on in my spare time because I care about the field of literature. I know no one owes us anything for this, but if you’d like to see things like this—or like the Best Translated Book Awards, or the World Cup of Literature, or our summer internships—please consider You can donate any amount via that link, or, if you’d prefer, you can support our by purchasing a ticket and gifting it to someone local who otherwise wouldn’t be able to do.