Let's focus on the top 100.
First and foremost, a disclaimer: This is obviously not really a list of the 100 best books by women in translation... because no such list could ever possibly exist! Every canon will be flawed in some form or other, as I'll be discussing more over the next few days and weeks. Our list is crowdsourced and borne of reader-love; it is a list that is strongly rooted in current reading trends (even if you might be surprised by some inclusions/omissions... I certainly was!). There's a lot of ink to be spilled over just about every title that ended up making it into the top 100 and much more over those that didn't make it, but here's the bottom line: Whether or not these are truly the 100 best books by women writers from around the world, whether or not this is a flawlessly representative list, and whether or not we'd get the same list if we tried again next week (I am confident we would not), this is a list of 100 books by women writers from around the world that people loved. That's worthy in and of itself.
But enough of my thoughts! I'll have plenty of time to talk about things I find interesting, surprising, or disappointing about this list at a later time (and I assure you, I will). Instead, I now present to you...
The 100 Best Books by Women Writers in Translation
Title | Author | Translator(s) into English | Language | Country | Vote tally | Original publication |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
My Brilliant Friend | Elena Ferrante | Ann Goldstein | Italian | Italy | 26 | 2011 |
The Vegetarian | Han Kang | Deborah Smith | Korean | South Korea | 24 | 2007 |
Fever Dream | Samanta Schweblin | Megan McDowell | Spanish | Argentina | 22 | 2014 |
Human Acts | Han Kang | Deborah Smith | Korean | South Korea | 19 | 2014 |
The Door | Magda Szabó | Len Rix | Hungarian | Hungary | 19 | 1987 |
Flights | Olga Tokarczuk | Jennifer Croft | Polish | Poland | 19 | 2007 |
Convenience Store Woman | Sayaka Murata | Ginny Tapley Takemori | Japanese | Japan | 19 | 2016 |
The Summer Book | Tove Jansson | Thomas Teal | Swedish | Finland | 17 | 1972 |
The Housekeeper and the Professor | Yoko Ogawa | Stephen Snyder | Japanese | Japan | 13 | 2003 |
The Years | Annie Ernaux | Alison L. Strayer | French | France | 12 | 2008 |
Things We Lost in the Fire | Mariana Enríquez | Megan McDowell | Spanish | Argentina | 12 | 2016 |
Death in Spring | Mercè Rodoreda | Martha Tennant | Catalan | Spain | 12 | 1986 |
Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead | Olga Tokarczuk | Antonia Lloyd-Jones | Polish | Poland | 12 | 2009 |
Sphinx | Anne Garréta | Emma Ramadan | French | France | 11 | 1986 |
Die, My Love | Ariana Harwicz | Sarah Moss, Carolina Orloff | Spanish | Argentina | 11 | 2012 |
Kitchen | Banana Yoshimoto | Megan Backus | Japanese | Japan | 11 | 1987 |
Persepolis | Marjane Satrapi | Mattias Ripa, Blake Ferris, Anjali Singh | French | Iran / France | 11 | 2000 |
Disoriental | Négar Djavadi | Tina Kover | French | Iran / France | 11 | 2016 |
The Mussel Feast | Birgit Vanderbeke | Jamie Bulloch | German | Germany | 10 | 1990 |
The Notebook Trilogy | Ágota Kristóf | Alan Sheridan | French | Hungary | 9 | 1991 |
Innocence | Heda Margolius Kovály | Alex Zucker | Czech | Czech Republic | 9 | 1985 |
The House of the Spirits | Isabel Allende | Magda Bogin | Spanish | Chile | 9 | 1982 |
The End of Days | Jenny Erpenbeck | Susan Bernofsky | German | Germany | 9 | 2013 |
A True Novel | Minae Mizumura | Juliet Winters Carpenter | Japanese | Japan | 9 | 2002 |
The Unwomanly Face of War | Svetlana Alexievich | Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky | Russian | Belarus | 9 | 1985 |
Eve Out of Her Ruins | Ananda Devi | Jeffrey Zuckerman | French | Mauritius | 8 | 2006 |
Trieste | Daša Drndić | Ellen Elias-Bursać | Croatian | Croatia | 8 | 2007 |
Bonjour Tristesse | Françoise Sagan | Irene Ash | French | France | 8 | 1954 |
Love | Hanne Ørstavik | Martin Aitken | Norwegian | Norway | 8 | 1997 |
Suite Française | Irène Némirovsky | Sandra Smith | French | France | 8 | 1942 |
So Long a Letter | Mariama Bâ | Modupe Bode-Thomas | French | Senegal | 8 | 1979 |
The Tale of Genji | Murasaki Shikibu | Various | Japanese | Japan | 8 | 1008 |
The Elegance of the Hedgehog | Muriel Barbery | Alison Anderson | French | France | 8 | 2006 |
Tentacle | Rita Indiana | Achy Obejas | Spanish | Dominican Republic | 8 | 2015 |
Kristin Lavransdatter | Sigrid Undset | Various | Norwegian | Norway | 8 | 1922 |
Second Hand Time | Svetlana Alexievich | Bela Shayevich | Russian | Belarus | 8 | 2013 |
Territory of Light | Yūko Tsushima | Geraldine Harcourt | Japanese | Japan | 8 | 1979 |
The Hour of the Star | Clarice Lispector | Benjamin Moser | Portuguese | Brazil | 7 | 1977 |
Woman at Point Zero | Nawal El Saadawi | Sherif Hetata | Arabic | Egypt | 7 | 1975 |
Soviet Milk | Nora Ikstena | Margita Gailitis | Latvian | Latvia | 7 | 2015 |
Notes of a Crocodile | Qiu Miaojin | Bonnie Huie | Chinese | Taiwan | 7 | 1994 |
La Bastarda | Trifonia Melibea Obono | Lawrence Schimel | Spanish | Equatorial Guinea | 7 | 2016 |
Vernon Subutex I | Virginie Despentes | Frank Wynne | French | France | 7 | 2015 |
Revenge | Yoko Ogawa | Stephen Snyder | Japanese | Japan | 7 | 1998 |
Memoirs of a Polar Bear | Yoko Tawada | Susan Bernofsky | German | Germany | 7 | 2014 |
Nada | Carmen Laforet | Edith Grossman | Spanish | Spain | 6 | 1945 |
Near to the Wild Heart | Clarice Lispector | Alison Entrekin | Portuguese | Brazil | 6 | 1943 |
Strange Weather in Tokyo / The Briefcase | Hiromi Kawakami | Allison Markin Powell | Japanese | Japan | 6 | 2001 |
Go, Went, Gone | Jenny Erpenbeck | Susan Bernofsky | German | Germany | 6 | 2015 |
Seeing Red | Lina Meruane | Megan McDowell | Spanish | Chile | 6 | 2012 |
Fish Soup | Margarita García Robayo | Charlotte Coombe | Spanish | Colombia | 6 | 2018 |
The Lover | Marguerite Duras | Barbara Bray | French | France | 6 | 1984 |
Memoirs of Hadrian | Marguerite Yourcenar | Grace Frick | French | France | 6 | 1951 |
The Wall | Marlen Haushofer | Shaun Whiteside | German | Austria | 6 | 1963 |
Family Lexicon | Natalia Ginzburg | Various | Italian | Italy | 6 | 1963 |
People in the Room | Norah Lange | Charlotte Whittle | Spanish | Argentina | 6 | 1950 |
Mouthful of Birds | Samanta Schweblin | Megan McDowell | Spanish | Argentina | 6 | 2008 |
Poems | Sappho | Various | Ancient Greek | Greece | 6 | -570 |
The Faculty of Dreams | Sara Stridsberg | Deborah Bragan-Turner | Swedish | Sweden | 6 | 2006 |
Thus Were Their Faces | Silvina Ocampo | Daniel Balderston | Spanish | Argentina | 6 | 1993 |
The Second Sex | Simone de Beauvoir | Various | French | France | 6 | 1949 |
The True Deceiver | Tove Jansson | Thomas Teal | Swedish | Finland | 6 | 1982 |
Faces in the Crowd | Valeria Luiselli | Christina McSweeney | Spanish | Mexico | 6 | 2011 |
A View with a Grain of Sand | Wisława Szymborska | Stanislaw Baranczak, Clare Cavanagh | Polish | Poland | 6 | 1995 |
The Queue | Basma Abdel Aziz | Elisabeth Jaquette | Arabic | Egypt | 5 | 2016 |
Fox | Dubravka Ugrešić | Ellen Elias-Bursać | Croatian | Croatia | 5 | 2017 |
The Days of Abandonment | Elena Ferrante | Ann Goldstein | Italian | Italy | 5 | 2002 |
History | Elsa Morante | William Weaver | Italian | Italy | 5 | 1974 |
Arturo's Island | Elsa Morante | Various | Italian | Italy | 5 | 1957 |
Confessions | Kanae Minato | Stephen Snyder | Japanese | Japan | 5 | 2008 |
The Ten Thousand Things | Maria Dermoût | Hans Koning | Dutch | Indonesia / Netherlands | 5 | 1955 |
My Heart Hemmed In | Marie NDiaye | Jordan Stump | French | France | 5 | 2007 |
The Unit | Ninni Holmqvist | Marlaine Delargy | Swedish | Sweden | 5 | 2006 |
The Bridge of Beyond | Simone Schwarz-Bart | Barbara Bray | French | Guadeloupe | 5 | 1972 |
Purge | Sofi Oksanen | Lola Rogers | Finnish | Finland | 5 | 2008 |
The Story of My Teeth | Valeria Luiselli | Christina MacSweeney | Spanish | Mexico | 5 | 2013 |
Swallowing Mercury | Wioletta Greg | Eliza Marciniak | Polish | Poland | 5 | 2014 |
Tokyo Ueno Station | Yu Miri | Morgan Giles | Japanese | Japan | 5 | 2014 |
The Little Girl on the Ice Floe | Adélaïde Bon | Various | French | France | 4 | 2018 |
Extracting the Stone of Madness | Alejandra Pizarnik | Yvette Siegert | Spanish | Argentina | 4 | 1972 |
The Remainder | Alia Trabucco Zerán | Sophie Hughes | Spanish | Chile | 4 | 2015 |
The Seventh Cross | Anna Seghers | Margo Bettauer Dembo | German | Germany | 4 | 1942 |
The Naked Woman | Armonía Somers | Kit Maude | Spanish | Uruguay | 4 | 1950 |
Waking Lions | Ayelet Gundar-Goshen | Sondra Silverston | Hebrew | Israel | 4 | 2012 |
The Quest for Christa T. | Christa Wolf | Christopher Middleton | German | Germany | 4 | 1968 |
A Winter's Promise | Christelle Dabos | Hildegarde Serle | French | France | 4 | 2013 |
Mirror Shoulder Signal | Dorthe Nors | Misha Hoekstra | Danish | Denmark | 4 | 2015 |
Sweet Days of Discipline | Fleur Jaeggy | Tim Parks | Italian | Switzerland | 4 | 1989 |
Zuleikha | Guzel Yakhina | Lisa Hayden | Russian | Russia | 4 | 2015 |
The Hunger Angel | Herta Müller | Philip Boehm | German | Romania / Germany | 4 | 2009 |
Please Look After Mom | Kyung-sook Shin | Chi Young | Korean | South Korean | 4 | 2008 |
Like Water for Chocolate | Laura Esquivel | Thomas Christensen, Carol Christensen | Spanish | Mexico | 4 | 1989 |
La Femme de Gilles | Madeleine Bourdouxhe | Faith Evans | French | Belgium | 4 | 1937 |
The History of Bees | Maja Lunde | Diane Oatley | Norwegian | Norway | 4 | 2015 |
The Weight of Things | Marianne Fritz | Adrian Nathan West | German | Austria | 4 | 1979 |
Translation as Transhumance | Mireille Gansel | Ros Schwartz | French | France | 4 | 2014 |
Out | Natsuo Kirino | Stephen Snyder | Japanese | Japan | 4 | 1997 |
Our Lady of the Nile | Scholastique Mukasonga | Melanie L. Mauthner | French | Rwanda / France | 4 | 2012 |
Subtly Worded | Teffi | Anne Marie Jackson, Robert Chandler | Russian | Russia | 4 | 1990 |
The Letter for the King | Tonke Dragt | Laura Watkinson | Dutch | The Netherlands | 4 | 1962 |
Not disappointed at all! 6 of my 10 made it into the top 100! (Ferrante, Tokarczuk(2), Greg, Oksanen, Sappho). Thank you so much for your work on this. Looking forward to the complete list of 700+
ReplyDelete7 of 10! I missed seeing Garréta in my first excited pass-through the list!
Deleteis there a reason why women poets are excluded from this list?
ReplyDeleteThey're not! Sappho, Alejandra Pizarnik, Wisława Szymborska... These are just the titles that were the top-rated, just ended up being more fiction/nonfiction than poetry. There's more in the full list (which will be released next month, most likely), per people's nominations/votes. :)
Deletethanks! I did miss them, and i love all three. didn't check the entire list, but a few more poets wouldn't hurt...
ReplyDeleteThis is amazing! Can't wait to see the entire list, but I'm pleased to see that I've read many of these, even if all my favourites didn't make it to the final 100 ;)
ReplyDeleteGreat list. Just one thing: Sigrid Undset was Norwegian.
ReplyDeleteYes she was! *facepalm* Correcting that quickly...
DeleteThanks for this line up.
ReplyDeleteWould love to see how many there are of each genre (fiction, non-fiction, poetry...) either on this page, or to look forward to in a future blog post!
ReplyDeleteI suspect many readers were like me and initially thought of the fiction they'd read.
I probably won't be able to do a full breakdown, but I will be discussing basic genre breakdown from this list at a later stage!
DeleteThe newest translation of Sigrid Undset's Kristen Lavransdatter is by Tiina Nunnally. Tiina's award winning translation brings to life the beauty of the this masterpiece.
ReplyDeleteYes, I actually recently purchased it myself! But because there are various translators from over the years, I felt that it'd be more appropriate to acknowledge the status the book has (and there's no room to list them *all*). I'll be talking about the books with multiple translations at a later stage, though!
DeleteLovely!
ReplyDeleteA quirky nuance that I noticed about Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada. I see you have it listed as German and Germany and that would be true that the 2016 English version was based on the German edition from 2014. The original 2011 book was in Japanese though, as far as I could figure out when I did a few clicks around Goodreads. Not sure if you want to reflect that or is it too nitpicky? You can get the links to the different editions and years inside the review here https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1875860237
ReplyDeleteReally? Wow, I didn't know that! My understanding was that it was one of Tawada's originally-German titles. I'll look into that some more and update accordingly.
DeleteI've done some digging in the catalogues of the Japanese and German national libraries. On the German one, it says (translated the German from Google translate, because I'm lazy): "Yoko Tawada first wrote this novel in Japanese. And translated it herself, the first time she herself translated one of her texts written in Japanese. When translating the text of course, the text was changed, some new she wrote. Is it an original novel or a translation, if the author translates her own text and partially rephrased in the other language in which she also writes original? May we submit such a book to the German novel prize, or to the international translator's prize, or to neither?" (see: http://d-nb.info/1037980212, click on "Inhaltstext", which gives you a summary of the book as well as the above paragraph)
ReplyDeleteSo, the German text is not identical to the Japanese one...
In that case, I'll be sticking with German since the English-language translation is specifically from German. Hand-waving galore!
DeleteThanks to Sanne for the research! That helps explain a lot. But is the date of the original text of "Memoir of a Polar Bear" then 2014? :D
Delete...you're making my life complicated here!!! :P Oh well, what's true is true...
DeleteI love that Maria Dermoût made it to the list - and I'm ashamed I hadn't thought of voting for The ten thousand things... It's one of my favorite books!
ReplyDeleteBut how did you determine the country-column? Is it where the book is based, where the author is born or the nationality of the author? Because Maria Dermoût was Dutch and all of her fiction is set in colonial Indonesia, which is where she was born. If you're going by place the author is born in, Tonke Dragt should also have Indonesia (but she's also Dutch).
I mostly went with where the author predominantly lived/lives/identifies as, less a question of literal birth. My understanding re: Dermoût is that she mostly lived in Indonesia, but I can definitely update that to be Indonesia/Netherlands if that makes more sense! It's definitely a little hand-wavy. :P
DeleteOnly 2 of mine made it, but I do like quite a few of the ones that did (and would probably have nominated them if I'd thought of it at the time instead of doing it in a very unsystematic, emotional fashion rather than logically and evidence-based).
ReplyDeleteYes, I think mentioning both is a lovely solution! I only now notice you've also done so with other authors. People don't always fit neatly in boxes, so hand-wavy sounds only reasonable ;)
ReplyDeleteand I just noticed I was so deep into the nitty gritty that I didn't even thank you for all your work this morning! So hereby: thanks for putting this together. Can't wait to dig into this list!
"Pedra de Tartera" Maria Barbal
ReplyDeleteCatalunya
" Poesia Maria" Mercè Marçal
ReplyDeleteCatalunya
"L'hora violeta" Montserrat Roig
Catalunya
Thanks for this list and for the Literary Saloon for the link.
ReplyDelete