Books that Travel 2024
Great stories travel and translate well. Promoting literary translation fosters cultural exchange and enriches the global literary landscape. There are several tools to help books travel across linguistic borders. These include recognition and awards for translators and translated fiction and non-fiction books; educational initiatives that bring literary translation to schools and universities; translation grants and fellowships; book festivals, books fairs – especially those with Guest of Honour programmes - and literary events; collaborations between publishers in different countries; government-funded translation programmes; translators residencies; translators associations and initiatives; book clubs that focus on translated literature. Perhaps you can think of a few more.
These tools can all be harnessed to help create a more inclusive and diverse literary landscape that reflects the richness of global storytelling. Promoting literary translation is a celebration of cultural diversity and an investment in fostering understanding and empathy across borders. In this spirit, we are happy to present below a selection of books translated into English from German that have recently been published. Let’s raise a glass to the translators, publishers, advocates, librarians, and all those who work in the promotion of translated literature, mining for German-language gems they can bring to a broader audience through translation into English. Prost!
Single title
Juli Zeh’s epic new novel explores our present predicaments, biases, weaknesses, and fears, but—above all—it reveals the strengths that come...
Juli Zeh’s epic new novel explores our present predicaments, biases, weaknesses, and fears, but—above all—it reveals the strengths that come to light when we dare to be human.
Contact Foreign Rights: gesche.wendebourg@penguinrandomhouse.de
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Fiction
- ISBN:
- 978-1-64286-133-4
- Author:
- Juli Zeh
- Pages:
- 320
Walter Kempowski portrays the drama of the exodus from East Prussia, telling the story of a family in the final...
Walter Kempowski portrays the drama of the exodus from East Prussia, telling the story of a family in the final winter of the war. The book, rich in perspective, is a chronicle of loss – the loss of homeland, tradition, culture and a sense of civilisation.
Contact for foreign rights: gesche.wendebourg@penguinrandomhouse.de
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Fiction
- ISBN:
- 978-1-78378-884-2
- Author:
- Walter Kempowski
- Pages:
- 480
A collection of unique, profound, and witty stories that relate animals’ peculiarities to human attitudes....
A collection of unique, profound, and witty stories that relate animals’ peculiarities to human attitudes.
Contact Foreign Rights: ibrandt@kiwi-verlag.de
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Fiction
- ISBN:
- 978-1-80309-262-1
- Author:
- Eval Menasse
- Pages:
- 312
Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker is widely considered one of the most important European poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries....
Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker is widely considered one of the most important European poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Contact Foreing Rights: rights@suhrkamp.de
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Poetry
- ISBN:
- 978-1-80309-142-6
- Author:
- Friederike Mayröcker
- Pages:
- 200
The vignettes in At No Time each begin in familiar situations, often set in Vienna or other Austrian cities, but...
The vignettes in At No Time each begin in familiar situations, often set in Vienna or other Austrian cities, but immediately diverge into supernatural or fantastical situations or strange encounters. The author was a member of the Gruppe 47 writers’ group which sought to renew German-language literature after World War II.
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Fiction
- ISBN:
- 978-1-80309-144-0
- Author:
- Ilse Aichinger
- Pages:
- 144
An atmospheric, contemporary police procedural set on Lake Zurich, introducing detective Rosa Zambrano....
An atmospheric, contemporary police procedural set on Lake Zurich, introducing detective Rosa Zambrano.
Contact for foreign rights: bau@diogenes.ch
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Fiction
- ISBN:
- 978-1-78227-957-0
- Author:
- Seraina Kobler
- Pages:
- 256
Winner of the Swiss Book Prize and nominated for the German Book Prize, this book set in post-Communist Romania, on...
Winner of the Swiss Book Prize and nominated for the German Book Prize, this book set in post-Communist Romania, on the border with Transylvania, is an atmospheric tale of revenge and extremism. When a mutilated corpse is discovered in the family crypt of Prince Vlad the Impaler, the mayor plans a vampire-themed amusement park. But this will be the kiss of death for the place and its people.
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Fiction
- ISBN:
- 978-1-914518-21-8
- Author:
- Dana Grigorcea
- Pages:
- 206
Epic Annette is the extraordinary true story of Annette Beaumanoir: brilliant and fierce, she was a medical student living in a...
Epic Annette is the extraordinary true story of Annette Beaumanoir: brilliant and fierce, she was a medical student living in a world at war who, at nineteen years old, joined the French Resistance and saved the lives of two Jewish children in Paris on the eve of their deportation to the camps. Winner of the German Book Prize in 2020.
Contact Foreign Rights: rights@matthes-seitz-berlin.de
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Fiction
- ISBN:
- 978-1-911648-45-1
- Author:
- Anne Weber
- Pages:
- 181
What did the disintegration of the Soviet Union feel like for the people who lived through it? Award-winning writer Sasha...
What did the disintegration of the Soviet Union feel like for the people who lived through it? Award-winning writer Sasha Salzmann tells this story in a remarkable novel about two women in extraordinary times.
Contact Foreign Rights: cascio@suhrkamp.de
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Fiction
- ISBN:
- 978-1-78227-948-8
- Author:
- Sasha Salzmann
- Pages:
- 288
The third book in The Woodwalkers, a shapeshifting adventure series....
The third book in The Woodwalkers, a shapeshifting adventure series.
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Children’s/young adult book
- ISBN:
- 978-1-64690-022-0
- Author:
- Katja Brandis
- Pages:
- 250
In the Long Run We’re All Dead tells us about the lives of great economists and how they developed the theories...
In the Long Run We’re All Dead tells us about the lives of great economists and how they developed the theories for which they became famous, explaining these often-complex ideas – of Utilitarianism, of Social Costs, and the Endowment Effect, to name just a few – in a style that is engaging, irreverent, and comic.
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Non-fiction
- ISBN:
- 978-3-946334-52-1
- Author:
- Björn Frank
- Pages:
- 152
Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married....
Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. Against the backdrop of the declining GDR and the upheaval after 1989, award-winning author Jenny Erpenbeck tells of the abysses of happiness in her unmistakable language.
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Fiction
- ISBN:
- 978-1-78378-612-1
- Author:
- Jenny Erpenbeck
- Pages:
- 304
Love in a Time of interweaves some of the greatest love stories of the 1930s with the darkening backdrop of...
Love in a Time of interweaves some of the greatest love stories of the 1930s with the darkening backdrop of fascism in Europe, in a journey into the past that brings history and its actors to vivid life.
Contact for foreign rights: foreignrights@fischerverlage.de
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Non-fiction
- ISBN:
- 978-1-80081-116-4
- Author:
- Florian Illies
- Pages:
- 336
Madina’s family have fled war to seek asylum in Europe and begin a hopeful new life. Yet she finds herself...
Madina’s family have fled war to seek asylum in Europe and begin a hopeful new life. Yet she finds herself caught between her new life and her traumatic memories of the past. Can Madina find the path that’s right for her?
Contact Foreing Rights: Friederike.Barakat@hanser.de
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Children’s/young adult book
- ISBN:
- 978-1-83913-124-0
- Author:
- Julya Rabinowich
- Pages:
- 288
In 1981 a woman came to West Berlin as an eighteen-year-old to study medicine and met a man twice her...
In 1981 a woman came to West Berlin as an eighteen-year-old to study medicine and met a man twice her age. At the turn of the millennium and age of thirty-six, she meets another man. He is thirty-six too. Why are the men in her life always thirty-six? Is she still the person she remembers? This book is an engaging exploration of romance.
Contact Foreign Rights: judith.habermas@dumont.de
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Fiction
- ISBN:
- 978-1-80309-148-8
- Author:
- Judith Kuckart
- Pages:
- 200
An isolated woman living in a small town decides to take in a mysterious stranger, known only as ‘the visitor’....
An isolated woman living in a small town decides to take in a mysterious stranger, known only as ‘the visitor’. Overstaying is a debut novel that poses questions about the known and the unknown, about origin and home, about assimilation and integration, about privacy and hospitality.
Contact for foreign rights: rights@suhrkamp.de
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Fiction
- ISBN:
- 978-1-80533-016-5
- Author:
- Ariane Koch
- Pages:
- 208
In Ulrike Almut Sandig’s latest volume of poetry, it is only a leap from the creation of the world to...
In Ulrike Almut Sandig’s latest volume of poetry, it is only a leap from the creation of the world to the symphony of the Berlin metropolis.
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Poetry
- ISBN:
- 978-1-80309-252-2
- Author:
- Ulrike Almut Sandig
- Pages:
- 132
This fervid, ground-breaking novel, written when Reimann was only twenty-seven, remains one of the cult classics of East German literature....
This fervid, ground-breaking novel, written when Reimann was only twenty-seven, remains one of the cult classics of East German literature.
Contact Foreign Rights: ihmels@aufbau-verlag.de
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Fiction
- ISBN:
- 978-0-241-55584-2
- Author:
- Brigitte Reimann
- Pages:
- 144
Shida Bazyar tells a powerful story about the tensions and monstrosities that determine the everyday lives of three young women...
Shida Bazyar tells a powerful story about the tensions and monstrosities that determine the everyday lives of three young women - Hani, Kasih and Saya – who have been friends since they were young.
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Fiction
- ISBN:
- 978-1-915590-20-6
- Author:
- Shida Bazyar
- Pages:
- 288
Winner of the 2020 Leipzig Book Fair Prize. A bestselling novel (150,000+ copies in German) telling of the moment of...
Winner of the 2020 Leipzig Book Fair Prize. A bestselling novel (150,000+ copies in German) telling of the moment of idealism and upheaval after the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
Contact Foreign Rights: rights@suhrkamp.de
- Publisher:
- Topic:
- Fiction
- ISBN:
- 978-1-913505-74-5
- Author:
- Lutz Seiler
- Pages:
- 592
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