Best Translated Book Award
Based on Wikipedia: Best Translated Book Award
Here's a sobering fact about American reading habits: only about three percent of all books published in the United States each year are translations. Three percent. In most European countries, that number hovers between twenty-five and forty percent. This means that the vast majority of American readers spend their entire lives confined to literature originally written in English, missing out on the rich traditions of Hungarian magical realism, Norwegian introspection, Arabic poetry, and countless other literary worlds.
The Best Translated Book Award was born from this disparity—and from an organization that took its name from that damning statistic.
A Prize Named After a Problem
Three Percent is the online literary magazine of Open Letter Books, which itself is the translation press of the University of Rochester. The name is simultaneously a badge of honor and an indictment. These are people who have dedicated their professional lives to the three percent, fighting to expand it one book at a time.
In 2008, Three Percent launched the Best Translated Book Award with a simple but radical premise: recognize not just the translator's craft, but the entire ecosystem that brings foreign literature to American readers. The judges evaluated what they called "the entire package"—the original author's vision, the translator's interpretation, the editor's refinement, and the publisher's commitment to bringing the work into English.
This holistic approach set it apart from other translation prizes. The award wasn't just celebrating linguistic virtuosity. It was celebrating the complex, often underfunded chain of people who believe that American readers deserve access to the world's literature.
The Economics of Literary Translation
For the first two years, the Best Translated Book Award carried no cash prize at all. Winners received recognition and, presumably, a boost in sales—though sales figures for translated literature are notoriously modest. The award was, in a sense, a gift economy: recognition from peers who understood how difficult and undercompensated translation work truly is.
That changed in October 2010, when Amazon announced it would underwrite the prize with a twenty-five thousand dollar grant. This allowed both the translator and the original author to receive five thousand dollars each. The involvement of Amazon—a company that has complicated relationships with publishers, authors, and literary culture generally—raised eyebrows in some quarters. But the money was real, and for translators who often earn far less per hour than minimum wage for their painstaking work, five thousand dollars represented meaningful recognition.
To understand why this matters, consider what translation actually involves. A translator doesn't just swap words from one language to another. They must capture voice, rhythm, cultural context, wordplay, and the ineffable qualities that make literature sing. They must make countless decisions about how to handle idioms that don't exist in English, cultural references that American readers won't recognize, and syntactical structures that work beautifully in Hungarian or Japanese but would sound bizarre translated literally. A novel that took an author three years to write might take a translator two years to render into English—for a fraction of the author's advance, and often without royalties.
The Rise of Roberto Bolaño
The award's early years coincided with—and helped amplify—one of the most significant translation events in contemporary American literature: the posthumous discovery of Roberto Bolaño.
Bolaño, a Chilean novelist who died in 2003 at age fifty, was largely unknown to American readers until Natasha Wimmer's translation of "The Savage Detectives" appeared in 2007. It made the first Best Translated Book Award shortlist. The following year, Wimmer's translation of "2666"—Bolaño's massive, mysterious, five-part posthumous novel about murders in the Mexican desert—won the fiction prize.
Also shortlisted in 2009 was "Nazi Literature in the Americas," translated by Chris Andrews. Bolaño had suddenly become inescapable in American literary circles, a writer whose Spanish-language reputation had been transformed into English-language phenomenon through the dedicated work of translators.
The Bolaño moment illustrated exactly what the Best Translated Book Award hoped to celebrate: translators as cultural gatekeepers, determining which voices from other literary traditions would break through to American readers. Without Wimmer and Andrews, Bolaño might have remained a writer known only to specialists.
A Tour Through World Literature
Scanning the shortlists from the award's thirteen-year run is like taking a graduate seminar in contemporary world literature. The geographical range alone is staggering.
From Hungary came Attila Bartis's "Tranquility" and multiple works by László Krasznahorkai, including "Satantango" and "Seiobo There Below." Hungarian literature, with its complex grammatical structure and distinctive Central European sensibility, found unexpected champions among American readers.
The German-speaking world contributed Robert Walser's rediscovered novels, Stefan Zweig's "The Post Office Girl," Jenny Erpenbeck's "Visitation," and Herta Müller's "The Hunger Angel." Walser in particular became a minor cult figure in translation—a Swiss writer who spent the last decades of his life in a mental asylum, whose miniature, strange fictions found new life through Susan Bernofsky's translations. Bernofsky herself appeared repeatedly on shortlists, becoming one of the award's de facto stars.
From the Middle East came Elias Khoury's "Yalo," Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's novels from Persian, and Mahmoud Darwish's poetry from Arabic. South American literature extended far beyond Bolaño to include César Aira's slim, surreal Argentine fictions, Alejandro Zambra's "Bonsai" from Chile, and Clarice Lispector's mystical Brazilian meditations.
Norwegian literature had its moment with Per Petterson's "Out Stealing Horses" and, later, Karl Ove Knausgaard's "My Struggle" series. The latter became a genuine publishing phenomenon—six volumes of autobiographical fiction that prompted endless debates about the boundaries between memoir and novel, privacy and art.
The Curious Case of the Poetry Prize
From the beginning, the Best Translated Book Award recognized both fiction and poetry—a decision that set it apart from many literary prizes and acknowledged poetry's vital role in world literature.
The poetry shortlists reveal a different geography than the fiction lists. Chinese poets like Yu Jian and Xi Chuan appeared alongside Romanian poets like Nichita Stănescu and Liliana Ursu. Japanese experimental poetry from Hiromi Ito and Kiwao Nomura sat beside Swedish avant-garde work from Aase Berg and Fredrik Nyberg.
Poetry translation presents unique challenges that prose translation doesn't. A prose translator must capture meaning and voice; a poetry translator must somehow capture meaning, voice, rhythm, sound, and often formal structure—all while working between languages that may have entirely different prosodic systems. English is a stress-timed language; Japanese is mora-timed; French counts syllables. How do you translate a haiku's seventeen morae into English syllables? How do you capture the internal rhymes of Arabic classical poetry in a language with a different phonetic inventory?
The answer, of course, is that you can't—not exactly. You can only create something new that honors the original. The Best Translated Book Award's poetry winners represented the best attempts at this impossible task.
The Small Press Ecosystem
Look at the publishers on any Best Translated Book Award shortlist, and you'll notice something: very few of the big five publishers appear. Instead, the lists are dominated by small, independent presses that have made translation their mission.
Archipelago Books shows up repeatedly—founded specifically to publish international literature, they've become one of the most important translation publishers in America. New Directions, with its century-long history of bringing avant-garde and international writing to American readers, appears frequently. Open Letter Books, which runs the award, occasionally appears on its own shortlists. Dalkey Archive Press, Ugly Duckling Presse, Melville House, Zephyr Press—these are the organizations that keep the three percent alive.
Many of these presses operate on shoestring budgets, supported by university affiliations, grants, or the dedication of people who could earn more money doing almost anything else. They exist because someone believes American readers need access to László Krasznahorkai's hypnotic Hungarian sentences or Elfriede Czurda's Austrian experimental poetry.
The New York Review Books Classics series deserves special mention. Their program of republishing overlooked or forgotten works has introduced American readers to writers like Victor Serge, Stefan Zweig, and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky—authors who might otherwise have remained obscure outside their original languages.
The Translators Themselves
Certain translator names recur throughout the award's history like a who's who of the profession's elite.
Susan Bernofsky, mentioned earlier, translated multiple Robert Walser novels and Jenny Erpenbeck's "Visitation." She's also a scholar of translation, someone who thinks deeply about what it means to move a text between languages and cultures.
Bill Johnston translated Wiesław Myśliwski's "Stone Upon Stone," which won the fiction prize in 2012, along with multiple other works from Polish. Chris Andrews became César Aira's primary English translator, capturing the Argentine writer's deadpan surrealism across numerous slim volumes. Natasha Wimmer's Bolaño translations effectively created an English-language author who hadn't existed before.
These translators don't just translate; they advocate. They convince publishers to take on projects, write introductions explaining cultural context, give interviews promoting their authors, and generally serve as ambassadors for entire literary traditions. When Americans discover a foreign author they love, they often don't realize they're also falling in love with a translator's voice, a translator's choices, a translator's years of invisible labor.
What Made a Winner
Looking at the fiction winners across the years reveals certain patterns.
The 2009 winner, Bolaño's "2666," represented the award at its most ambitious: a novel of over nine hundred pages that defies easy summary, blending detective fiction, literary satire, philosophical meditation, and horror into something unprecedented.
The 2010 winner, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's "Memories of the Future," showed the award's commitment to rediscovery. Krzhizhanovsky was a Soviet-era writer whose work was suppressed during his lifetime and only published decades after his death. Joanne Turnbull's translations introduced English readers to a writer they'd never had the chance to encounter.
Tove Jansson's "The True Deceiver," which won in 2011, demonstrated that the award wasn't just for sprawling masterpieces. Jansson—best known internationally for the Moomin children's books—wrote this spare, psychologically acute novel about two women in a small Swedish-speaking Finnish village. Thomas Teal's translation captured its Nordic clarity.
"Stone Upon Stone," the 2012 winner, represented something different again: a Polish novel narrated entirely by a peasant farmer reflecting on his life, his family, and the construction of a family tomb. Bill Johnston's translation had to capture a voice that was uneducated but not simple, rural but not rustic, specific to Polish village life but universal in its meditation on mortality.
László Krasznahorkai won twice—for "Satantango" in 2013 and "Seiobo There Below" in 2014. The Hungarian writer's distinctive style, featuring enormously long sentences that spiral through consciousness, presented George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet with formidable translation challenges. That both translators succeeded well enough to win back-to-back prizes speaks to Krasznahorkai's importance and to the translators' skill.
The Poetry Winners
Poetry prizes often go to safer choices than fiction prizes—established reputations, canonical figures, work that reinforces existing hierarchies. The Best Translated Book Award's poetry selections were more adventurous than most.
The 2008 poetry winner, "The Collected Poems" of Zbigniew Herbert, represented something like a canonical choice—Herbert being one of the most celebrated Polish poets of the twentieth century. But the translation itself was notable: a collaborative effort by Czesław Miłosz (himself a Nobel laureate and one of Herbert's peers), Peter Dale Scott, and Alissa Valles.
Later poetry winners tilted toward the contemporary and experimental. Aleš Šteger's "The Book of Things" brought Slovenian poetry to American readers. Nichita Stănescu's "Wheel with a Single Spoke" introduced the Romanian master to a wider audience through Sean Cotter's translations. Elisa Biagini's "The Guest in the Wood" showcased contemporary Italian poetry in a collaborative translation by three translators.
The poetry awards highlight how small the world of poetry translation actually is. The same translators, publishers, and presses appear repeatedly. Ugly Duckling Presse, a nonprofit poetry press in Brooklyn, shows up on nearly every poetry shortlist. These are communities of dedication, people who care deeply about work that will never make anyone rich or famous.
The Pandemic and the End
The 2020 awards were the last to be given out. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted everything, including the small world of literary translation prizes. In January 2023, Chad Post—the award's founder and organizer—announced on the Three Percent blog that the prize would remain on "continued hiatus."
The announcement was characteristically understated. No dramatic explanation, no blame assigned, just an acknowledgment that the award, which had run for thirteen years and recognized some of the most important translated works of its era, would not be continuing.
What does it mean for a prize like this to disappear? Other translation awards exist—the National Book Award has a translation category, as does the PEN America literary awards program. But the Best Translated Book Award's specific focus on both fiction and poetry, its commitment to recognizing the entire publishing ecosystem, and its origin in the "three percent" critique of American literary insularity made it distinctive.
Its absence leaves a gap, another small loss in the already precarious infrastructure that supports literary translation in America.
Why Translation Matters
The case for translation is ultimately the case for curiosity, for recognizing that the way we see the world is not the only way to see it.
When American readers encounter László Krasznahorkai's endless sentences, they're not just reading a novel; they're experiencing a Hungarian way of constructing thought. When they read Mahmoud Darwish's poetry, they're encountering a Palestinian experience of loss and longing that no American writer could have written. When they read Clarice Lispector's mystical Brazilian meditations, they're accessing a spiritual and linguistic tradition utterly unlike anything in English-language literature.
This isn't just about diversity in some checkbox sense. It's about the expansion of consciousness that comes from encountering genuinely different ways of thinking, seeing, and expressing. Languages aren't just different words for the same things; they're different ways of carving up reality, different assumptions about what matters and how to express it.
The translators, editors, and publishers who make this possible—the people the Best Translated Book Award honored for thirteen years—are doing essential cultural work. They're fighting against the provincialism that comes naturally to speakers of a global language, reminding Americans that their literature is just one literature among many, and not necessarily the most interesting one.
A Partial Canon
For readers looking to explore the world of translated literature, the Best Translated Book Award shortlists offer an excellent starting point. A few recommendations from across the years:
For those who want to understand what contemporary international literary fiction looks like at its most ambitious, start with Roberto Bolaño's "2666" or László Krasznahorkai's "Satantango." Both are demanding, lengthy, and utterly unlike most American fiction.
For something more accessible, try Tove Jansson's "The True Deceiver" or Alejandro Zambra's "Bonsai"—both are short, psychologically acute, and demonstrate that world literature doesn't have to mean world-sized books.
For rediscovery of lost masters, seek out Robert Walser's novels in Susan Bernofsky's translations, or Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's surreal Soviet-era stories.
For poetry, the collected works of Zbigniew Herbert offer a lifetime of reading, while more adventurous readers might try Nichita Stănescu's Romanian modernism or Xi Chuan's contemporary Chinese poetry.
Each of these works exists in English because someone—usually multiple someones—believed it should. The translators, editors, and publishers who brought them across linguistic borders did so knowing the financial rewards would be modest and the recognition limited. The Best Translated Book Award, for thirteen years, offered that recognition. Its absence makes the work no less important.
The Three Percent Problem Persists
The fundamental problem the award was created to address hasn't gone away. American publishing still translates far less than publishing industries in other countries. American readers still have limited access to the world's literature. The infrastructure supporting translation—the small presses, the dedicated translators, the grants and prizes that make the economics barely workable—remains fragile.
But the books remain. The translations that won and were shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award over thirteen years constitute something like an alternative canon—a guide to what excellent, ambitious, world-spanning literature looked like in the early twenty-first century, as filtered through the judgment of people who dedicated their lives to making that literature available.
The award is on hiatus. The three percent problem continues. But every reader who picks up "2666" or "The True Deceiver" or "Stone Upon Stone" is participating in the same project the award celebrated: the belief that literature in translation matters, that American readers deserve access to the world's stories, and that the translators who make that access possible deserve recognition for their essential, invisible art.