16 May 2016
On Monday evening, the inaugural winners of the new Man Booker International prize will be named, rewarding the best translated novel of the year, a high-profile acclamation with a generous prize pot split evenly between translator and original author. And as part of this welcome focus, the MBIP has commissioned research from Nielsen into how the increasing number of works of translated literature actually sell. The headline data is still only partial, but promising: in the past 15 years, while the overall fiction market has stagnated, translated fiction sales have apparently increased by 96%. And today’s translations actually sell on average better than non-translations. But should we really be surprised?
