World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2024

It’s time to celebrate another year of translations, and there’s plenty to celebrate. The inaugural volume of Best Literary Translations 2024 arrived, published by Deep Vellum. Reviewing it for World Literature Today, Alice-Catherine Carls wrote that “while most authors are contemporary, texts written in Old Egyptian, Ancient Greek, medieval rune, Tigrinya, Mapuche-Huilliche, and Wayuu remind us of the need to protect endangered literatures.” We look forward to the 2025 volume, guest-edited by Cristina Rivera Garza.

In other notable translation news, a new publisher entered the field: Foundry Editions published four books in English translation. House of Anansi published Innie Shadows, written and translated by Olivia M. Coetzee, the first novel translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans, while Knopf published a translation of a rediscovered novel by Gabriel García Márquez: Until August, translated by Anne McLean.

Kairos, by Jenny Erpenbeck and translated by Michael Hofmann, won the International Booker Prize. Erpenbeck has appeared in World Literature Today and visited the University of Oklahoma when she was the Puterbaugh Fellow in 2018. Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Ananda Devi won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Kazim Ali and Jeffrey Zuckerman, both translators of Devi’s work into English, joined the celebrations at the Neustadt Lit Fest in Norman, Oklahoma, where Devi accepted the Neustadt Prize. Both Devi and Han have been featured in World Literature Today’s pages, and both will appear again in our January 2025 issue. The works available in English by these three writers alone would make a great reading-in-translation list.

For our end-of-year list, we’ve again listed seventy-five notable translations. As always, we recognize there are many more, including translated lit for children. We hope you’ll add to our list in the comments on our social media channels using the hashtag #2024InTranslation, along with those you’re eagerly anticipating in 2025.

Thank you for being in conversation with us this past year. We wish you good health and good reading in 2025.

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Jussi Adler-Olsen, Locked In, trans. Caroline Waight (Dutton)

Bothayna Al-Essa, The Book Censor’s Library, trans. Sawad Hussain & Ranya Abdelrahman (Restless Books)

Bothayna Al-Essa, Lost in Mecca, trans. Nada Faris (Dar Arab)

Linnea Axelsson, Ædnan, trans. Saskia Vogel (Knopf)

Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume (Book II), trans. Barbara Haveland (New Directions)

Salim Barakat, The Universe, All at Once: Selected Poems, trans. Huda J. Fakhreddine (Seagull Books)

Éric Chevillard, Museum Visits, trans. Daniel Levin Becker (Yale University Press)

Paulina Chiziane, The Joyful Song of the Partridge, trans. David Brookshaw (Archipelago Books)

Bora Chung, Your Utopia, trans. Anton Hur (Algonquin Books)

Olivia M. Coetzee, Innie Shadows, trans. Olivia M. Coetzee (House of Anansi)

Luis Alberto de Cuenca, My Favorite Monster and Other Poems, trans. Gustavo Pérez Firmat (Diálogos)

Julie Delporte, Portrait of a Body, trans. Helge Dascher & Karen Houle (Drawn & Quarterly)

Cécile Desprairies, The Propagandist, trans. Natasha Lehrer (New Vessel Press)

Egypt + 100, ed. Ahmed Naji, trans. Majd Abu Shawish, Robin Moger, Andrew Leber, Elisabeth Jaquette, Mohammed Ghalayini, Raphael Cohen, Raph Cormack, Paul Starkey, Mayada Ibrahim, Basma Ghalayini, Maisa Almanasreh, and Rana Asfour (Comma Press)

Juan Gelman, Otrarse: Ladino Poems, ed. & trans. Ilan Stavans (University of New Mexico Press)

Nino Haratischvili, Juja, trans. Ruth Martin (Scribe)

Nidia Hernández, The Farewell Light, trans. Rowena Hill (Arrowsmith Press)

Eliana Hernández-Pachón, The Brush, trans. Robin Myers (Archipelago Books)

Michel Houellebecq, Annihilation, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Damir Karakaš, Celebration, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać (Two Lines Press)

Elias Khoury, Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea, trans. Humphrey Davies (Archipelago Books)

Kim Hye-jin, Counsel Culture, trans. Jamie Chang (Restless Books)

Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Third Realm, trans. Martin Aitken (Penguin)

Julia Kornberg, Berlin Atomized, trans. Jack Rockwell & Julia Kornberg (Astra House)

Andrey Kurkov, The Silver Bone, trans. Boris Dralyuk (HarperVia)

Elin Anna Labba, The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sámi, trans. Fiona Graham (University of Minnesota Press)

Carlos Labbé, The Murmuration, trans. Will Vanderhyden (Open Letter)

Conceição Lima, No Gods Live Here: Selected Poems, trans. Shook (Deep Vellum)

Zülfü Livaneli, On the Back of the Tiger, trans. Brendan Freely (Other Press)

Angélica Lopes, The Curse of the Flores Women, trans. Zoë Perry (Amazon Crossing)

Luo Ying, Water Sprite, trans. Denis Mair (White Pine Press)

Tanja Maljartschuk, Forgottenness, trans. Zenia Tompkins (Liveright)

Michele Mari, Verdigris, trans. Brian Robert Moore (And Other Stories)

Layla Martínez, Woodworm, trans. Sophie Hughes & Annie McDermott (Two Lines Press)

Valeria Meiller, The Odd Month, trans. Whitney DeVos (Black Ocean)

Fiston Mwanza Mujila, The Villain’s Dance, trans. Roland Glasser (Deep Vellum)

Ibrahim Nasrallah, Palestinian, trans. Huda J. Fakhreddine (World Poetry Books)

Samira Negrouche, Solio, trans. Nancy Naomi Carlson (Seagull Books)

Andrés Neuman, Once upon Argentina, trans. Nick Caistor & Lorenza Garcia (Open Letter)

Nguyễn Thanh Hiện, Chronicles of a Village, trans. Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng (Yale University Press)

Yoko Ogawa, Mina’s Matchbox, trans. Stephen B. Snyder (Pantheon)

Makenzy Orcel, The Emperor, trans. Nathan H. Dize (Seagull Books)

Kallia Papadaki, Dendrites, trans. Karen Emmerich (World Editions)

Claudia Peña Claros, The Trees, trans. Robin Myers (Relegation Books)

Irma Pineda, Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater, trans. Wendy Call (Phoneme Media)

Carlos Pintado, Music for Bamboo Strings, trans. Lawrence Schimel (Sundial House)

Farhad Pirbal, Refugee Number 33,333, trans. Pshtiwan Babakr & Shook (Deep Vellum)

Alana S. Portero, Bad Habit, trans. Mara Faye Lethem (HarperVia)

Adriana Riva, Salt, trans. Denise Kripper (Veliz Books)

Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, Samahani, trans. Mayada Ibrahim & Adil Babikir (Foundry Editions)

Shahzoda Samarqandi, Mothersland, trans. Shelley Fairweather-Vega (Slavica)

Mikeas Sánchez, How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems, trans. Wendy Call & Shook (Milkweed Editions)

Yishai Sarid, The Third Temple, trans. Yardenne Greenspan (Restless Books)

Baqytgul Sarmekova, To Hell with Poets, trans. Mirgul Kali (Tilted Axis Press)

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Silence of the Choir, trans. Alison Anderson (Europa Editions)

Constantia Soteriou, Brandy Sour, trans. Lina Protopapa (Foundry Editions)

Nasser Asu Srour, The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on the Meaning of Hope, trans. Luke Leafgren (Other Press)

Domenico Starnone, The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan, trans. Oonagh Stransky (Europa Editions)

Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Your Absence Is Darkness, trans. Philip Roughton (Biblioasis)

Yoko Tawada, Spontaneous Acts, trans. Susan Bernofsky (Dialogue)

Jeferson Tenório, The Dark Side of Skin, trans. Bruna Dantas Lobato (Charco Press)

Taina Tervonen, The Bone Whisperers: Two Women Scientists and Their Work to Connect Lost Lives in Bosnia-Herzegovina, trans. Sarah Robertson (Schaffner Press)

Thuận, Elevator in Sài Gòn, trans. Nguyễn An Lý (New Directions)

Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead Books)

Fernanda Trías, Pink Slime, trans. Heather Cleary (Scribner)

Dubravka Ugrešić, A Muzzle for Witches, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać  (Open Letter)

Maddalena Vaglio Tanet, Untold Lessons, trans. Jill Fouston (Pushkin Press)

Fernando Vallejo, The Abyss, trans. Yvette Siegert (New Directions)

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Taiwan Travelogue, trans. Lin King (Graywolf Press)

Samar Yazbek, Where the Wind Calls Home, trans. Leri Price (World Editions)

Atsuhiro Yoshida, Goodnight Tokyo, trans. Haydn Trowell (Europa Editions)

Asako Yuzuki, Butter, trans. Polly Barton (Ecco)

Isabel Zapata, A Whale Is a Country, trans. Robin Myers (Fonograf Editions)

Stefan Żeromski, The Homeless, trans. Stephanie Kraft (Paul Dry Books)

Lamie Ziadé, My Great Arab Melancholy, trans. Emma Ramadan (Pluto Press)