British readers lost in translations as foreign literature sales boom
If like me you enjoy reading translated novels you’ll appreciate that translating a novel is not only a skill but an art!
Popular Scandinavian authors including Jo Nesbø and Stieg Larsson are driving growing domestic demand for translated books.
British readers are devouring foreign fiction in record numbers amid a mini-boom in translated novels, inspired by the success of Scandinavian authors such as Jo Nesbø.
Surging interest in foreign literature in recent years has been sparked partly by the success of Scandinavian fiction – notably Stieg Larsson, whose Millennium books have sold more than 75 million copies in 50 countries, and popular television dramas such as The Killing.
In 2012, Hesperus Press, a tiny British firm, sensed potential in a comic Swedish novel that went on to become a European publishing phenomenon after major British and American companies rejected it. Hesperus bought the rights to Jonas Jonasson’s The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, which went on to sell more than 500,000 copies.
Chris White, fiction buyer for Waterstones, said that, blockbusters apart, there are “plenty of translated titles we’ve discovered recently which have sold in their thousands”. He singled out The Collini Case, a legal thriller by Ferdinand von Schirach, one of Germany’s top authors, which has sold 29,385 copies – “more than the last John Grisham” – eclipsing some homegrown novels that barely sell a few hundred. “The perception of translations isn’t what it was perhaps 10 years ago,” he said. “They are just treated as great books.”
Full article: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/24/british-readers-translations-foreign-literature-sales-boom-stieg-larsson-jo-nesbo