Translated book sales are up, but Britain is still cut off from foreign literature

Bestsellers from the likes of Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard have helped the market, but fundamental obstacles to reading genuinely widely remain

Today is International Translation Day. Look at any bookshop bestseller shelf in the UK and you’ll see translated names everywhere: Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Haruki Murakami, Swedish names all over crime fiction. Recent sales figures seem to suggest that the British public has steadily become more open to European and international authors: according to Nielsen, which undertook research for the International Man Booker prize this year, the number of translated books bought in Britain increased by an astounding 96% between 2001 and 2015. Translated fiction sells better, overall, than English literary fiction and made up 7% of all UK fiction sales in 2015.

Related: Translated fiction sells better in the UK than English fiction, research finds

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