August always comes and goes in a blaze of sunshine and out of office autoresponses, but something that’s worth lingering on each year is Women in Translation Month. The Translator’s Database has reported that the percentage of translated fiction by women has risen to around 48% since 2021, and this year we are seeing a huge outpouring of awareness and admiration for women in translation from across the industry.

Amazing strides are being made, but there’s always still work to be done! For now, we want to celebrate by taking you around the world with these 17 incredible books from women in translation, all published this year so far…

Argentina

Bad Girls

A new queen of magical realism has arrived on the literary scene. Described by Torrey Peters as “a wise, uncommon, and bewitching storyteller”, Camila Sosa Villada is an award-winning author writing from Argentina. Her novel Bad Girls and short story collection I’m a Fool to Want You bring to life a spectrum of extravagant and profoundly human personalities.

Gritty and unflinching, yet also tender, fantastical, and funny, Bad Girls is a trans woman’s tale about finding a community on the margins. In Sarmiento Park, the green heart of Cordoba, a group of trans sex workers make their nightly rounds. When a cry comes from the dark, their leader, the 178-year-old Auntie Encarna, wades into the brambles to investigate and discovers a baby half dead from the cold. Telling the stories of the women around her as well as her own journey from a toxic home in a small, poor town, Camila traces the life of this vibrant community throughout the 90s.

I’m a Fool to Want You

In the 1990s, a woman makes a living as a rental girlfriend for gay men. In a Harlem den, a travesti gets to know none other than Billie Holiday. A group of rugby players haggle over the price of a night of sex, and in return they get what they deserve. Nuns, grandmothers, children, and dogs are never what they seem… These 9 stories are inhabited by extravagant and profoundly human characters who face an ominous reality in ways as strange as themselves.

Brazil

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman

From bestselling novelist Patrícia Melo comes a masterful thriller set in the far west of Brazil that is by turns poetic, inspiring, humorous and harrowing. To escape an overprotective family and an abusive partner, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about an epidemic of violence against women that seems beyond comprehension.

What she finds in the jungle is not only relentless oppression, but a deep longing for answers to an unsolved crime from her past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of warrior women on a path of revenge and recovers the painful details of her mother’s death.

Denmark

First Comes Summer

Winding seamlessly between the psychological and the mythological, this Danish novel is a spellbinding story of a young woman’s dangerous passion as it plays out over the course of an eerie summer.

In their remote Viking settlement, Folkvi and her brother, Aslakr, have always been close – unnaturally close. They’ve grown more intimate still as Folkvi learns her shaman mother’s craft, as men regard her with newly devouring eyes. Then illness carries off their parents, and the nest of home is shattered. Aslakr sets off on his first expedition, abandoning Folkvi to the dark of an endless winter. When he returns, he’s done the unthinkable: He’s found someone else to love.

Sick with grief, Folkvi rages to the gods where they sit at the foot of an ancient tree, contemplating the twisted passions of humans that play out in the face of an ever-approaching end of days. Will none of them save her now? Very well, Folkvi will save herself. The wedding date is set. But first comes a fateful summer.

Ecuador

Blood Red

Shortlisted for the USA Republic of Consciousness Prize 2022, Blood Red is a fierce portrayal of a woman navigating the grey — or red  — zones of her uncertainties and paradoxical urges. In a torrent of stream-of-consciousness fragments, the unnamed narrator of Blood Red recounts the aftermath of her failed marriage in explicit, sensual detail. She falls in and out of love, parties with her friends, skates around the city at night, does a lot of drugs, and gives in to her impulses. Her internal monologue is punctuated by bouts of trypophobia, an obsessive cataloguing of holes that empty, fill, widen, and threaten to swallow her entirely.

France

Célina

In the late 1850s, Célina, a young girl aged fifteen, takes up work as a maid for the Hugo family in Guernsey. There she encounters the delicate balance between the professional and the personal, and the obligations upon her as her livelihood is at stake. Célina navigates a life of hardship and loss, but not without crucial moments of pleasure and pride. In a voice full of the innocence of youth, yet studded with fine observations about her surroundings, her perspective offers a nuanced, potentially challenging portrait of the man and the artist. Axelrad’s fictional account is based on cryptic notes found in Hugo’s diaries as well as letters from his wife.

Germany

Boy with a Black Rooster

Eleven-year-old Martin has nothing but the shirt on his back, and a black rooster which is both a protector and a friend. The villagers steer clear of the boy, finding him strange; far too smart and kind. They would rather mistreat him than acknowledge his talents. When Martin meets a travelling painter and seizes the chance to leave the village with him, he is led into a terrible world which, thanks to his compassion and understanding, he is able to resist, becoming a saviour for those even more innocent than he is. An eleven-year-old boy with all the wisdom of the world shows us that with common sense, courage and a pure heart, we can change the world.

Greece

Kassandra and the Wolf

Six-year-old Kassandra is given a doll: ‘I put her to sleep in her box, but first I cut off her legs and arms so she’d fit,’ she tells us, ‘Later, I cut her head off too, so she wouldn’t be so heavy. Now I love her very much.’ Kassandra is an unforgettable narrator, a perfect, brutal guide to childhood as we’ve never seen it — a journey that passes through the looking glass but finds the darkest corners of the real world. This edition brings Kassandra and the Wolf back into print — a tour de force and, as Karapanou liked to call it, a scary monster of a book.

Mozambique

The Joyful Song of the Partridge

A roiling chronicle of motherhood and colonization from the recipient of the 2021 Camões Prize, the most important award for literature in the Portuguese language. No one knows where Maria des Dores came from. Did she ride in on the armoured spines of crocodiles, was she carried many miles in the jaws of fish?

The only clear fact is that she is here, sitting naked in the river bordering a town where nothing ever happens. The townspeople murmur restlessly that she is possessed by perverse impulses. They interpret her arrival as an omen of crop failure or, in more hopeful tones, a sign that womankind will soon seize power from the greedy hands of men.

As The Joyful Song of the Partridge unfolds, Paulina Chiziane spirals back in time to Maria’s true origins: the days of Maria’s mother and father when the pressure to assimilate in Portuguese-controlled Mozambique formed a distorting bond on the lives of black Mozambicans.

Norway

Emily Forever

Em’s nineteen years old and pregnant. Her boyfriend Pablo has gone out ‘to take care of something’ and hasn’t returned. Her mother, who raised Emily alone, moves into the little apartment to help. Meanwhile, Em’s neighbour, who may or may not be a clergyman, wonders if it’s normal to be so infatuated with someone you’ve never spoken to. Em’s boss at the supermarket might have feelings for her too, if only she’d notice. Emily Forever is a novel of unyielding solidarity and smouldering social dissent, by a new star of Scandinavian literature.

Poland

Paperback | Seven Stories Press UK | 9781911710080 | Published April 2024 | £12.99

The latest story from award-winning playwright, novelist and psychologist Zyta Rudzka, Dr. Josef’s Little Beauty is a fascinating and terrifying Holocaust story exploring aging and war crimes, pain and pride.  In the middle of summer, omnipresent heat radiates as a group of elderly people are remembering their youth. The story focuses on two sisters, Leokadia and Czechna, who live together in a retirement home not far from Warsaw. These are not ordinary stories they are sharing, because both of them spent time as children in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. At the center is Czechna, who at the age of 12 was saved from extermination by the notorious doctor Josef Mengele, the real-life Nazi officer and physician who was known as the ‘angel of death’ for the experiments he conducted on prisoners, including twins and siblings.

South Korea

I’ll Be Right There

Kyung-Sook Shin is one of South Korea’s most widely read and acclaimed novelists. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages and honoured by multiple prestigious prizes. I’ll Be Right There tells the fascinating story of how friendship, European literature and a charismatic professor defy war, oppression, and the absurd.

Set in 1980s South Korea amid the tremors of political revolution, I’ll Be Right There follows Jung Yoon, a highly literate, twenty-something woman, as she recounts her tragic personal history as well as those of her three intimate college friends.

 When Yoon receives a distressing phone call from her ex-boyfriend after eight years of separation, memories of a tumultuous youth begin to resurface, forcing her to re-live the most intense period of her life. Yoon’s formative experiences, which highlight both the fragility and force of personal connection in an era of absolute uncertainty, become immediately palpable. Shin makes the foreign and esoteric utterly familiar: her use of European literature as an interpreter of emotion and experience bridges any gaps between East and West.

Wafers

Originally published in 2006, Wafers is Ha Seong-nan’s third short story collection to appear in English. In this original bestseller, Ha Seong-nan weave troublesome coincidences into the seemingly banal in her signature style of engrossing and unsettling prose.

When truth is more gruesome than fiction — Ha Seong-nan is there. When people give in to their most intrustive thoughts — Ha Seong-nan is there. When man is more animal than animals themselves — Ha Seongnan is there.

Spain

Un Amor

On the heels of a cryptic mistake, Nat arrives in the rural village of La Escapa. She rents a small house from a negligent landlord, adopts a dog and begins to work on her first literary translation. But nothing in La Escapa is easy: her dog is ill tempered and skittish, and mutual misunderstandings with her neighbours simmer below the surface.

When conflict arises over repairs to her house, Nat receives an unusual offer — one that tests her sense of self and reveals her most unexpected desires. As Nat tries to understand her decision, the community of La Escapa comes together in search of a scapegoat.

Syria

Where the Wind Calls Home

From one of Syrian’s most prominent contemporary writers and journalists Samar Yazbek, Where the Wind Calls Home tells the poignant story of a nineteen-year-old soldier in the Syrian army. As he lies on the ground beneath a tree, he sees a body being lowered into a hole – is this his funeral? There was that sudden explosion, wasn’t there? While trying to understand the extend of the damage, Ali works his way closer to the tree. His ultimate desire is to fly up to one of its branches, to safety. Through rich vignettes of Ali’s memories, we uncover the hardships of his traditional Syrian Alawite village, but also the richness and beauty of its cultural and religious heritage. Yazbek here explores the secrets of the Alawite faith and its relationship to nature and the elements in a tight poetic novel dense with life, hope and love.

Switzerland

About Uncle

Recipient of the 2022 Swiss Prize for Literature, Rebecca Gisler, is a Zurich-based author writing in French and German. Her debut was recently published in English by Peirene press, was described by Florence Bouchy (Les Monde des Livres) as a “penetrating novel on disability, family, relationships and modern times”.

In a small seaside town on the French coast lives Uncle. He shares his house with his niece and nephew, who look after him when they could be doing something — anything — else. A disabled veteran with odd habits, Uncle is prone to drinking, hoarding and gorging, not to mention the occasional excursion down into the plumbing, where he might disappear for days at a time. As the world begins to shut down, Uncle and his niece are forced even closer still. She starts to watch his every move — every bathroom break he takes, every pill he swallows — and finds herself relying on this man, her only companion.

Wales

This House

Anna has lived alone for decades. She is cocooned by, and marooned in, an isolated cottage called Nant yr Aur in the Welsh mountains. The arrival of Sion, a young man who seems strangely at home in the house, leads to an unpicking of Anna’s past.

As Anna’s relationship with Sion develops — to the point where he feels comfortable showering at Nant yr Aur — her perspective on the solidity of her past shifts. Uncertainty, distortion, illusion and subtle betrayal are gradually exposed. Ultimately, a quietly devastating revelation changes the lives of both Sion and Anna.

Sian Northey writes with economy and precision, setting out what the life of a middle-aged woman with an emotionally complicated past feels like from the inside.