Translated fiction is a booming business in the UK

A rare bright spot in the publishing industry, literature in translation is on the rise as younger people look beyond their own borders and thirst for other cultures

• By Andrew Dickson / Bloomberg

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When Stefan Tobler set up a not-for-profit publishing house in the UK with friends in 2010, it was a gamble. With little in the way of seed capital, they put in grant applications and sent out a call for subscribers to help them get off the ground. Given that they wanted to produce literary fiction, much of it in translation, making money was the last thing on anyone’s mind. The name they chose, And Other Stories, was a declaration that they intended to swim outside the mainstream.

Sixteen years on, they have had the kind of trajectory that makes more conventional publishers look on in envy. The first title they published, Down the Rabbit Hole by Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos, became the first translation to be shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and sold out of its first run.

A few years later, the publishing house picked up another Spanish-language title, author Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World, after it had been rejected as “untranslatable” and made it into a mass-market hit, selling more than 120,000 copies. This spring, And Other Stories became the first publisher to have back-to-back titles win the ultra-prestigious International Booker Prize.

Illustration: Constance Chou

“It’s another world now,” Tobler said. “It’s actually quite hard to believe.”

And Other Stories is far from alone: Translated fiction is booming in the UK. While overall fiction sales have plateaued, according to data from publishing analysts NielsenIQ, novels and short stories in translation are surging, up 36 percent in three years.

The delectable crime thriller Butter by the Japanese writer Asako Yuzuki became last year’s surprise hit in the UK, displacing celebrity memoirs and cookbooks from the bestseller lists. After South Korean novelist Han Kang won the International Booker Prize in 2016, sales of Korean fiction translations leaped 400 percent in the UK and surged even further after she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.

Nielsen data say it all: In 2001, fiction in translation accounted for an estimated 1.2 million copies sold in the UK. Last year, it was 3.7 million copies, a nearly fourfold increase, and perhaps 6 percent of overall fiction sales.

Tiny independents, including the Anglo-French Fitzcarraldo Editions and Latin American specialists Charco Press, are leading the charge. In an environment where half the books in the UK are produced by the so-called Big Four — Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins and Pan Macmillan — the fact that small publishers are dominating this niche suggests that the power balance in UK publishing is shifting.

These small publishers also appear to have reached an elusive demographic: Gen Z and younger millennials.

The people who buy translated fiction skew significantly younger than the average reader and seem to be getting younger, surveys by NielsenIQ and the Booker Foundation showed. Whereas general fiction buyers are predominantly older than 60, the largest percentage of purchasers of fiction in translation last year were age 25 to 34.

While evidence suggesting that these readers are more ethnically diverse and urban than the average reader is perhaps not surprising, what stands out is that they are also now more likely to be male — conspicuous in an era when most fiction is bought by women and there are anxieties that men are abandoning books altogether.

“It’s very encouraging,” Booker Prize Foundation chief executive Gaby Wood said. “Whenever you see a younger group of people doing something, you can convince yourself it’s the future.”

Not too long ago, the expectation was that translation was a barrier, something that was “difficult” or offered a second-rate reading experience, Wood said.

“Now there are some amazing translators; they’re almost producing whole new books. It’s seen as a collaboration,” she said. “People have been watching films with subtitles for years. People have been listening to music in Spanish or Portuguese or Korean. Why wouldn’t fiction be the same?”

Nonetheless, no one can quite put their finger on what is really behind the trend. New research by publishing consultant Laura Di Giuseppe highlights the effect of social media, especially TikTok and Instagram, which have driven surprise spurts in sales for titles as varied as Butter and novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky’s White Nights, which became a #BookTok sensation in 2024.

The minimalist design and chic branding of presses such as And Other Stories (elegant cream covers, artfully text-heavy) and Fitzcarraldo (deliciously collectable Yves Klein blue) have won many fans, drawing comparison with too-cool-for-school film studios such as Mubi and A24.

“They publish with such intentionality and focus,” Bea Carvalho, head of fiction at the bookstore chain Waterstones, said of Fitzcarraldo. “And they’re brilliant at books-as-furniture.”

The spotlight shone by awards such as the International Booker, whose rules were adjusted in 2016 to reward the authors and their translators, has added luster and led to increased sales during the past decade. Tomb of Sand by writer Geetanjali Shree, first published in Hindi, sold just 473 copies when the English translation was first published by the tiny Tilted Access Press. After it won the 2022 International Booker, 35,000 copies of the original Hindi version were sold in one week alone in India. A US edition followed, and rights were sold in more than one dozen languages.

Three years later, when Taiwanese writer Yang Shuang-zi’s (楊?子) Taiwan Travelogue won the International Booker, it saw sales gains of more than 1,000 percent, And Other Stories said.

Some wonder whether there are deeper cultural forces at work, too.

As 2016 was also the year Britons voted to leave the EU, a decision where older voters tipped the balance, Wood speculates that people in their 20s and 30s are yearning for international connection.

“I think you have a generation of people wanting to look beyond their own borders,” she said. “They want to know what else there is.”

Tobler said the enthusiasm goes far beyond Europe, adding that fiction from East Asia is especially popular, perhaps linked to the fanbase for South Korean drama and Japanese manga.

“I think there is just a real thirst for cultures other than our own,” he said.

For all that, fiction in translation is very far from a majority pursuit, and it shows no signs of dominating the industry. Hiring a translator remains a substantial cost, and inflation is hitting small presses especially hard. Even larger publishers struggle to make money on translations or more niche genres.

“Publishing literary titles is a complete lottery, really,” Tobler said.

While artificial intelligence is upending the world of languages, especially in technical publishing, the effects on literary fiction remain to be seen.

“We’re quite a way away from the sensitivity that a human can give a translation,” Wood said.

Even so, some are anxious that translators will lose out. However, many feel that, now that they have taste for it, English readers will not lose their appetite for tales from elsewhere.

“Most customers coming into our bookshops aren’t really thinking about whether a book is translated or not,” Carvalho said. “They just want a good story.”

Andrew Dickson is a journalist, editor and broadcaster. He writes for the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Guardian and the New Yorker, mainly on culture and society.