WITMonth, more than a decade later

What does WITMonth look like in the 2020s?

In 2013, I was a tired university student, procrastinating on a tedious physics homework assignment while studying in the math department library. I had downloaded the Three Percent database of literary translations, and was curious to check whether a gender imbalance I'd recently discovered in my own reading was something systemic or an unconscious bias on my own end. I discovered that women writers were actually wildly underrepresented in literary translations. Later, as my own interest in this subject grew, I backed up that mostly qualitative, thoughtful post with "the one with charts", showing a breakdown by languages and encompassing a much more rigorous review of the Three Percent database. I started hosting WITMonth, my reading interests shifted, and the women in translation project became a centerpiece of this blog and later a dedicated Twitter account and website.

Years passed.

I graduated from my undergraduate degree. Then my Master's. Then my PhD. I moved countries and began my postdoc. I got married. I had a baby. My posts on this blog slowed, then stopped. I logged off Twitter basically for good. I logged off Instagram mostly for good. I kept reading, but it felt different, like I was stumbling across books without the added expectations of blogging or being "WITMonth Founder". Things changed and things stayed the same.

When the 10-year anniversary of WITMonth rolled around, I kept thinking to myself: Okay, how can I make this year BIGGER and BETTER? WITMonth was happening with or without me at this stage, and indeed it felt like Bookstagram and BookTok influencers were doing it way better than I ever could, so what was the point? I saw Instagram posts with neat, clean graphics, "kindly provided by the publisher" books, and gorgeous aesthetic backgrounds getting 300, 400 likes. The videos were somewhat more inscrutable, since I don't have TikTok (and have no intention of getting it), but I was hearing reports about popular accounts discussing WITMonth and the importance of reading #womenintranslation. I'd always hoped that the popular bloggers would adopt WITMonth into their other types of literary activism, so this felt like a win.

And suddenly, I felt superfluous. Like a parent watching their child grow and no longer need their help with every little thing, nobody seemed to notice that I didn't put out a list of WITMonth new releases. Or then that I didn't post anything about my own WITMonth reading (even though it continued, as usual). Or that I didn't update the Women in Translation website. I stopped engaging with social media and just... faded into the background.

Except, of course, my interest never waned. It was only my sense of how to engage in WITMonth activism that shifted. I found myself - as ever - trying to read more broadly, to read outside of the established texts or the books that everyone seemed to be discussing (it helped that I no longer saw all of the publisher-promoted content or hype on social media), to think about what questions really mattered when talking about women writers from around the world in 2024, 2025, and now 2026. As my own life changed, I also wondered about literature that reflected some of those changes: books about pregnancy or motherhood took on a new meaning (though I didn't actually shift to reading more of them), as did books about all sorts of other heavy topics. I found that my reading was gradually shifting back to being a much broader mix of genres, which inevitably also brought back a lot more English-language literature and nonfiction.

But August approaches, as it does every year. And I find myself wanting to talk about women writers in translation.

It's true that since 2013, the landscape has changed rather starkly. I am constantly in awe of this post from the Three Percent blog, that so clearly shows the difference from 2008 through 2023, with women in translation now at near-parity levels overall (in new fiction and poetry). I am humbled to think that I had some part in that. Whether I'll ever play such a role again remains to be seen (I suspect not), but the fact that there already has been a major cultural shift in the publishing world. Yes, there are the publishers who still bury their heads in the sand and ignore their abysmal track records, but there are also several publishers at this point who literally only publish women writers in translation. When I started this project, it was rare for me to find a book by a woman writer in translation (even the most accessible, "normie" European writer) at an ordinary big-name or indie bookstore. Today, I find them everywhere, often translated from several different languages (French, Spanish, Danish, German, Swedish, Korean, Japanese, Polish, Russian, and Arabic are often prominent on bookstore shelves; it helps that there have been four WIT Nobel laureates since this project began) and spanning across continents. There are books from the biggest publishers and books from tiny independent presses. WIT are everywhere.

And yet some things haven't changed. Or maybe they've changed, but still demonstrate a huge gap.

There are still languages biases, of course. Indian languages have always been the ones that surprise me most, largely because there are actually a lot of translations into English from Indian languages, but these are published or marketed somewhat exclusively on the subcontinent. These books simply don't make their way out of India. There are biases that reflect smaller language markets, too: It's not that no books are published in Hausa, and yet it is extremely hard to find examples of works translated into English. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: It's rarely a situation of "This thing doesn't exist!", and more "This thing isn't very common!"

My end-goal remains the same, though. I want these stories to be accessible. I wrote on the WIT website "Every story counts" many years ago, and returned to that message for WITMonth this year. It's not just about having "more", having numerical parity, wonderful as that is (AND IT IS!). It's about recognizing that different stories and voices bring with them their own value. That was the idea behind the DailyWIT or so many other projects I ran over the years. I'll be returning to that this year, but recognizing that it's not just linguistic or country-based diversity. It's genre. It's politics (or lack thereof). It's books that are as suited to my baby as to me. It includes books that I find incredibly boring and it includes books that I find infuriating or damaging and it includes books that I adore beyond all measure. Every. story. counts.

Let's see if I can do it justice this year.