IN DEPTH
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: TRANSLATED STARS MARIE KONDO, YUVAL NOAH HARARI, PAULO COELHO AND LEILA SLIMANI
Category Spotlight Translated work
Harari prompts wave of success for translations
The breakout success of Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, as well as its two follow-up titles, was the vanguard for a surge in sales of translated work, with much of the top 20 taken up by agenda-setting foreign non-fiction
Kiera O’Brien @kieraobrien
TheBookseller.com
T
ranslated titles have had a phenomenal year in the UK, with Yuval Noah Harari leading a new wave of translated narrative non-fiction. However, for
the year to 29th September, it’s a fiction title that tops the chart, with Antonio Iturbe’s The Librarian of Auschwitz, translated from Spanish by Lilit Zekulin Thwaites, selling 154,087 copies. Similar to Heather Morris’ blockbuster The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Iturbe’s novel is a fictionalised version of real-life concentration camp librarian and Holocaust survivor Dita Kraus’ experiences. She ran a secret library in Auschwitz, where books were forbidden, from the age of 14. It won Iturbe Spain’s Fundación Troa Prize for literary qualit. However, The Librarian... is one of only three fiction titles in the top 10 (see overleaf): non-fiction dominates, with Harari featuring four times in the top 20 overall. Sapiens, originally published in Hebrew in Harari’s native Israel, performed solidly when it was released in the UK in 2015, shiſting just under 100,000 copies in paperback that year. But then 2016 rocked the world on Continues overleaf
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