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This is a list of the most translated literary works (including novels, plays, series, collections of poems or short stories, and essays and other forms of literary non-fiction) sorted by the number of languages into which they have been translated. Only translations published by established, independent publishers are taken into account, not people self-publishing translations (real or automatic) via publish-on-demand or on websites, to avoid artificially inflated counts.
Stanisław Herman Lem was a Polish writer of science fiction and essays on various subjects, including philosophy, futurology, and literary criticism. Many of his science fiction stories are of satirical and humorous character. Lem's books have been translated into more than 50 languages and have sold more than 45 million copies. Worldwide, he is best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world.
The International Dublin Literary Award, established as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1996, is presented each year for a novel written or translated into English. It promotes excellence in world literature and is solely sponsored by Dublin City Council, Ireland. At €100,000, the award is one of the richest literary prizes in the world. If the winning book is a translation, the prize is divided between the writer and the translator, with the writer receiving €75,000 and the translator €25,000. The first award was made in 1996 to David Malouf for his English-language novel Remembering Babylon.
Heidi is a work of children's fiction published between 1880 and 1881 by Swiss author Johanna Spyri, originally published in two parts as Heidi: Her Years of Wandering and Learning and Heidi: How She Used What She Learned. It is a novel about the events in the life of a 5-year-old girl in her paternal grandfather's care in the Swiss Alps. It was written as a book "for children and those who love children".
Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been best-sellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize and the Princess of Asturias Awards.
The New York Review of Books is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs. Published in New York City, it is inspired by the idea that the discussion of important books is an indispensable literary activity. Esquire called it "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language." In 1970, writer Tom Wolfe described it as "the chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic".
Azar Nafisi is an Iranian-American writer and professor of English literature. Born in Tehran, Iran, she has resided in the United States since 1997 and became a U.S. citizen in 2008.
Jonathan Strahan is an editor and publisher of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His family moved to Perth, Western Australia in 1968, and he graduated from the University of Western Australia with a Bachelor of Arts in 1986.
Penguin Classics is an imprint of Penguin Books under which classic works of literature are published in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean among other languages. Literary critics see books in this series as important members of the Western canon, though many titles are translated or of non-Western origin; indeed, the series for decades since its creation included only translations, until it eventually incorporated the Penguin English Library imprint in 1986. The first Penguin Classic was E. V. Rieu's translation of The Odyssey, published in 1946, and Rieu went on to become general editor of the series. Rieu sought out literary novelists such as Robert Graves and Dorothy Sayers as translators, believing they would avoid "the archaic flavour and the foreign idiom that renders many existing translations repellent to modern taste".
Per Petterson is a Norwegian novelist. His debut book was Aske i munnen, sand i skoa (1987), a collection of short stories. He has since published a number of novels with good reviews. To Siberia (1996), set in the Second World War, was published in English in 1998 and nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. I kjølvannet, translated as In the Wake (2002), is a young man's story of losing his family in the Scandinavian Star ferry disaster in 1990 ; it won the Brage Prize for 2000. His 2008 novel Jeg forbanner tidens elv won the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2009, with an English translation published in 2010.
Percival Everett is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Amanda Filipacchi is an American novelist. She was born in Paris and educated in both in France and in the U.S. She is the author of four novels, Nude Men (1993), Vapor (1999), Love Creeps (2005), and The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty (2015). Her fiction has been translated into 13 languages.
James M. H. Lovegrove is a British writer of speculative fiction.
Hanne Ørstavik is a Norwegian writer. She was born in Tana in Finnmark province in the far north of Norway, and moved to Oslo at the age of 16. With the publication of the novel Hakk (Cut) in 1994, Ørstavik embarked her writing career. Her literary breakthrough came three years later with the publication of Kjærlighet (Love), which in 2006 was voted the 6th best Norwegian book of the last 25 years in a poll published by Dagbladet. Since then she has written several novels and received a number of literary prizes.
Georgi Gospodinov Georgiev is a Bulgarian writer, poet and playwright. His novel Time Shelter received the 2023 International Booker Prize, shared with translator Angela Rodel, as well as the Strega European Prize. His novel The Physics of Sorrow received the Jan Michalski Prize and the Angelus Award. His works have been translated into 25 languages.
This is a list of the published works of Aliette de Bodard.
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is a Nigerian linguist, writer, translator, scholar, and cultural activist. His work and influence span the fields of education, language technology, literature, journalism, and linguistics. He is the recipient of the 2016 Premio Ostana "Special Prize" for Writings in the Mother Tongue for his work in language advocacy. He writes in Yoruba and English, and is currently the Africa editor of the Best Literary Translations anthology, published by Deep Vellum.
It [Before I Go to Sleep] has been translated into 40 languages and racked up blockbuster numbers in France, Canada, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, and the United States. (And this was writer S.J. Watson's debut novel.)
Already translated into 37 languages, The Book of Mirrors is the perfect novel for fans of psychological suspense and reading group fiction.