Celebrating Women in Translation Month:
Every August Women in Translation Month celebrates women writers from across the world whose works reach English speaking readers through translation.
The initiative was started by book blogger and researcher Meytal Radzinski in 2014 after she began looking more closely at the books being translated into English and found a stark imbalance: at the time, women accounted for less than 30% of translated literature published in English. Women writers were, as a result, a minority within an already small corner of English-language publishing.
The idea behind the month is simple: read them, talk about them, and make them easier for other readers to reach! Pick up a book originally written in a language you don’t speak; notice the translator’s name alongside the author’, maybe recommend it to someone else. There is no official reading list and no required number of books Women in Translation Month happens wherever readers decide to make space for it.
Translated literature is far bigger than the small shelf sometimes labelled World Fiction; there are ghost stories and love stories, vampires and gods, family sagas, strange little novels about obsession, sweeping histories, queer romances, children’s adventures… the possibilities are infinite!
Note: this list is not exhaustive.
So, if you are wondering where to begin, begin here:
Explore by genre: Horror, Thriller, & Gothic | Literary Fiction | Romance | Fantasy & Magic Realism | Children/ Young Reader’s Literature
Horror, Thriller, & Gothic
Translated from Korean by Archana Madhavan 
Have you ever though female rage would pair well with fangs? In Mothersucker, a grieving mother wakes beneath the earth transformed, and men who have harmed women begin turning up dead. Part vampire story, part crime novel and part reckoning with gendered violence, Mothersucker turns vengeance into something supernatural. Korean writer Kim Bohyun began her literary career in 2011 and has written three novels; this is the first of her novels to reach English readers. One for the preorder pile: the UK edition is due in October 2026.
Translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell
After an accident leaves Oghi paralysed and his wife dead, he becomes dependent on the mother-in-law who blames him for her daughter’s death. What follows is claustrophobic psychological horror built from helplessness, resentment and the terrifying possibility that the person caring for you might not wish you well. Hye-young Pyun is one of South Korea’s leading contemporary writers, whose short fiction has also appeared in publications including The New Yorker and Harper’s.
On Earth As It Is Beneath – Ana Paula Maia
Translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan
For readers who like their horror sun-beaten, brutal and horribly human… The story follows an isolated Brazilian penal colony, where incarceration has become something worse: on nights of the full moon, prisoners are released into the wilderness and hunted. Ana Paula Maia, a Brazilian novelist and screenwriter, has made violence, labour and the lives of people pushed to society’s edges central to her work. On Earth As It Is Beneath was shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize!
Translated from Spanish by Sarah Booker
Girlhood at its most feral, teenage obsession, internet horror, violence, desire, mothers, teachers and an invented god collide in a novel that understands adolescence as its own kind of haunting. Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda was named to the Bogotá39 list of outstanding Latin American writers under forty and has become one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Latin American horror. Jawbone was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature.
Fresh Dirt from the Grave – Giovanna Rivero
Translated from Spanish by Isabel Adey 
Across six stories, Giovanna Rivero moves through bodies, violence, pre-Columbian ritual, folk belief, science fiction and the Gothic, finding tenderness in places where it should perhaps be impossible. Rivero is a Bolivian novelist and short-story writer whose work has helped reshape the fantastic and Gothic traditions of contemporary Latin American fiction.
Literary Fiction
The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
Translated from Portuguese by Benjamin Moser
Macabéa is poor, hungry, almost invisible to the world around her… until Clarice Lispector places that invisibility under a microscope. Lispector, a Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer who became one of the defining literary voices of twentieth-century Brazil, plays with narration, identity and the limits of telling another person’s story. This was her final novel, published shortly before her death in 1977.
Translated from Korean by Soje 
Originally published in Korea as Proof of Gu, Hunger is a compact, feverish novel about love, money and what the world demands from us in return for staying alive. Choi Jin-young began her literary career in 2006 and has since become one of South Korea’s major contemporary novelists, winning prizes including the Shin Dong-yup Literary Prize and Yi Sang Literary Award.
Two women confront very 
different relationships with motherhood, choice, friendship and the lives they thought they were going to have. Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel has published novels and short stories in more than twenty languages, and Still Born was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. This exploration of the complicated nature of motherhood and its challenges is sure to stay with you for a long time.
The Woman from Tantoura – Radwa Ashour
Translated from Arabic by Kay 
Heikkinen
Ruqayya is thirteen when the 1948 Nakba reaches her Palestinian village of Tantoura. From there, Radwa Ashour follows a life shaped by displacement, family, memory, repeated loss and survival across Palestine and the diaspora. Ashour was an Egyptian novelist, scholar and critic who wrote more than fifteen works across fiction, memoir and criticism, and whose work repeatedly returned to history and the people required to live through it.
Crossing the Mangrove – Maryse Condé
Translated from French by Richard Philcox
One dead man. One village. No single version of the truth.When outsider Francis Sancher is found dead in a Guadeloupean village, the people who knew, desired, resented and feared him begin to speak. Their accounts slowly reveal as much about the community as they do about the dead man. Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé became one of the great voices of Caribbean literature, and in 2018 she was awarded the New Academy’s alternative Nobel Prize in Literature.
Winter in Sokcho – Elisa Shua Dusapin
Translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Cold coastlines, awkward silences and all the things left untranslated between two people. In the South Korean seaside town of Sokcho, a young woman working in a guesthouse meets a visiting French comic-book artist. Their uneasy connection unfolds against winter, food, bodies, borders and the narrator’s own French-Korean identity. Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin was born in France and raised between Paris, Seoul and Switzerland; the English translation of her debut won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature.
The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth – Veeraporn Nitiprapha
Translated from Thai by Kong Rithdee
Sisters Chareeya and Chalika grow up surrounded by the failures and fantasies of the adults who came before them, before love pulls them into a labyrinth of their own. Thai writer Veeraporn Nitiprapha won the S.E.A. Write Award for this novel in 2015 and again for a later novel in 2018, becoming the first woman to win the prize twice.
The Woman in the Purple Skirt – Natsuko Imamura
Translated from Japanese by Lucy North
We all watch strangers… right? There is a Woman in a Purple Skirt. There is also the woman watching her. What begins as curiosity becomes fixation in a short, strange novel about loneliness, work, intimacy and the unsettling places obsession can lead. Natsuko Imamura won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize for the novel in 2019.
Translated from French by Modupé Bodé-Thomas
Following her husband’s death, Ramatoulaye writes to her oldest friend and begins untangling marriage, betrayal, motherhood, friendship and women’s place in postcolonial Senegal. Senegalese novelist and feminist Mariama Bâ published only two novels before her death in 1981, but So Long a Letter became a landmark of African women’s writing and won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa in 1980.
Romance
Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
Translated from Spanish by Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen
Tita cannot marry Pedro because family tradition demands that the youngest daughter remain unmarried to care for her mother. So, desire finds another route: through food. Mexican novelist and screenwriter Laura Esquivel folds recipes, family history, magical realism, and romance together in a novel where emotion can move from one body to another around the dinner table.
The Two Mujeres – Sara Levi Calderón
Translated from Spanish by Gina Kaufer
Valeria has the respectable marriage, children and comfortable life expected of her within her Jewish community in Mexico City… until she falls in love with another woman and begins imagining a self beyond those expectations. Sara Levi Calderón’s novel became a bestseller in Mexico before reaching English readers and was a finalist for the American Library Association’s Gay and Lesbian Book Award in 1992.
Maximilian enters an arranged marriage with the formidable knight Riftan, but this is less interested in a fairy-tale ending than in what comes after it: intimacy, trauma, insecurity, power and the slow work of learning to believe yourself worthy of love. South Korean writer Suji Kim first found a huge readership through web fiction; Under the Oak Tree won RIDI’s Romance Webnovel Award before becoming an international publishing and webcomic success. The current print editions use an updated official English translation.
Fantasy & Magic Realism
The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
Translated from Spanish by Magda Bogin
Across generations of the Trueba family, the personal and political become impossible to separate as love affairs, violence, revolution and spirits move through the same house. The House of the Spirits was Chilean writer Isabel Allende’s debut novel and helped establish her as one of the world’s most widely read Spanish-language authors.
Heaven Official’s Blessing – Mo Xiang Tong Xiu
Translated from Chinese by Suika, with editor Pengie
Eight hundred years of longing and a romance prepared to outlive heaven itself? Yes please. Once a beloved crown prince and god, Xie Lian has fallen from heaven more than once. When he ascends again, his path becomes tangled with the mysterious ghost king Hua Cheng and a history neither of them has left behind. Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, often known as MXTX, is one of the most internationally successful writers of Chinese danmei, or Boys’ Love fiction, with several of her web novels becoming major global publishing and multimedia franchises.
Remnants of Filth: Yuwu – Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou
Translated from Chinese by Yu and Rui
For those who enjoy enemies-to-lovers, except first they were lovers, then enemies, and now everything hurts. Generals Mo Xi and Gu Mang were comrades, best friends and secret lovers until Gu Mang betrayed their nation. When he is finally returned, broken and without the man he once seemed to be, vengeance becomes far more complicated. Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou — also known to English-language readers as Meatbun Doesn’t Eat Meat — is a Chinese danmei writer with a large international readership; the complete official English edition of Remnants of Filth runs to seven volumes.
Children/ Young Reader's Literature
Children deserve a translated bookshelf too. Reading across languages shouldn’t be something we discover only after wandering into the literary-fiction section as adults; translated children’s books can introduce young readers to other storytelling traditions, histories and ways of imagining the world from the beginning.
The Djinn’s Apple – Djamila Morani
Translated from Arabic by Sawad Hussain
A murder mystery in the golden age of Baghdad? My younger self would have been thrilled (I still am). After her family is killed, twelve-year-old Nardeen sets out to discover why, drawing her into manuscripts, medicine, politics and danger in the Abbasid period. Algerian novelist Djamila Morani is also a professor of Arabic language and literature and writes historical fiction set in this period; Sawad Hussain’s English translation received support through an English PEN Translates Award.
Temple Alley Summer – Sachiko Kashiwaba
Translated from Japanese by Avery Fischer Udagawa, illustrated by Miho Satake
For children who like their summer holidays with ghosts, mysteries, and suspicious cats. Kazu sees a girl leaving his house in the middle of the night. The next morning, she is sitting in his classroom and everyone but him remembers her. Sachiko Kashiwaba has been writing children’s fantasy in Japan for more than forty years, and Temple Alley Summer won the 2022 Mildred L. Batchelder Award for an outstanding children’s book translated into English.
The Caiman – María Eugenia Manrique
Translated from Spanish by Amy Brill, illustrated by Ramón París
Based on a story from the author’s childhood in Venezuela, The Caiman remembers a clockmaker named Faoro and the baby caiman he raised, who became part of his family and community. Manrique herself was one of the children who visited the famous caiman, turning a local story and childhood memory into a picture book that could travel much further.
Translated from Arabic by M. Lynx Qualey
Palestinian teenager Noor is pulled into a journey through time, myth and history in a fantasy rooted in Palestinian storytelling. Sonia Nimr is a Palestinian writer, storyteller, oral historian and academic whose work for young readers draws deeply on folktales and oral traditions; the English translation of Thunderbird was shortlisted for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.
The Bossy Gallito / El gallo de bodas – Lucía M. González
Illustrated by Lulu Delacre
A bossy rooster gets his beak dirty on the way to a wedding and begins an increasingly ridiculous chain of requests to get himself cleaned up. Lucía M. González retells this traditional Cuban folktale in a bilingual English-Spanish edition, accompanied by Lulu Delacre’s illustrations. Because the two languages appear as parallel texts rather than one being presented as the translation of the other, this may be slightly outside the usual definition of Women in Translation but it is a lovely way to make multilingual storytelling part of a child’s bookshelf.
Reading Women in Translation beyond August
As the month comes to an end, you may see less recommendations or reviews of women in translation. We would like to invite you to continue reading, exploring, and sharing this list so that these stories can be enjoyed beyond this month.
If one of these books is making its way onto your reading list, consider buying it through our Bookshop links. Every purchase made through our affiliate links helps support the Scottish BPOC Writers Network at no extra cost to you, while adding another brilliant book to your shelves.
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The FULL list or recommendations for Women in Translation month: