Now in its tenth year, August is Women in Translation (WIT) month, a project that seeks to ‘rectify the imbalance in world literature’ by promoting women writers in translation. In the last year, we’ve published books translated from Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Indonesian, German, Dutch, Italian, Swedish, and French — and these are only the WIT titles!
We love to champion translated work here at Scribe, so to celebrate WIT month this year, we are offering 20 per cent off our WIT titles from the last two years. Just enter the code WIT23 at checkout.
Experimental (un)realities
Some of our fiction titles stand out for their startlingly creative premises — and our translated works are no exception.
- Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías (trans. Heather Cleary) is a striking, ominous novel that offers profound reflections on motherhood, marriage, and caregiving, set against the backdrop of a crumbling city.
- Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung (trans. Anton Hur) is a genre-defying collection of short stories blurs the lines between magical realism, horror, and science fiction, shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.
- Owlish by Dorothy Tse (trans. Natascha Bruce) is a boldly inventive exploration of life under repressive conditions, revealing a mordant and uncanny fable of contemporary Hong Kong.
A look into the past
One of the wonderful things about translated fiction is how it can open up foreign stories and settings to us, bringing with them their histories.
- Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri is a dazzling novella that eplores generational legacies, lost loves, the damage that war does to men, and the damage that men go on to do to women, set from the era of the Dutch East Indes to the current day. It was also very impressively translated by Dias Novita Wuri herself!
- Can’t I Go Instead is Lee Geum-yi’s new novel (trans. An Seon Jae) is a sweeping saga that begins in the 1930s and continues to the 2010s, following its two protagonists across continents and decades as they become swept up in the politics of the years.
- From Nino Haratischvili, author of international bestseller The Eighth Life, Juja (trans. Ruth Martin) reaches across Paris in 1953 to Amsterdam and Sydney in 2004 to explore the truth about one beloved (fictional) writer, and the women across time who have attached their lives to her.
Voice-driven contemporaries
From stream-of-consciousness style narration to sharp, concise vignettes, to a luxuriously evocative style of prose, these novelists share their stories in singular, unique styles that will stay with you long after you put their books down.
- Publishing in September, Sisters in Arms by Shaida Bazyar (trans. Ruth Martin) is a lyrical, explosive novel about the kind of extraordinary friendship that brings stability to an otherwise unstable world.
- What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma (trans. Sarah Timmer Harvey) tells the story of a narrator — a twin — who has recently lost her brother, as she looks back on their shared childhood and adult lives in brief, precise vignettes.
- Blue Hunger by Viola di Grado (trans. Jamie Richards) is an electrifying descent from loneliness and grief into obsessive, all-consuming love, told with wildly imaginative language.
Insightful nonfiction
While WIT month traditionally highlights fiction, nonfiction is such a large part of what we do here at Scribe that we would be remiss to not include some.
- Zen in the Garden by Miki Sakamoto (trans. Catherine Venner) is a peaceful, meditative recollection of Sakamoto’s observations from a life spent in contemplation of nature.
- Told through the prism of the author’s own diagnosis, The Autists by Clara Törnvall (trans. Alice E. Olsson) combines memoir with personal essay to explore autistic women in culture, myth, and society.
- Abortion by Pauline Harmange (trans. Caitlin O’Neil) is a powerful — and unfortunately, very timely — essay that provides an intimitate, detailed account of her abortion and delivers a resolutely political vision to share our experiences.
Again, enter code WIT23 for 20 per cent off these titles and eligible books published in 2022.
