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Ten Women, Ten Languages

August is Women in Translation Month, and this is our answer to it. Ten books, ten languages, and not one from a major publishing house. Bullaun Press in Sligo publishes translated literature and nothing else. Sandorf Passage runs out of Zagreb. Two Lines is the publishing arm of a San Francisco translation nonprofit. These are books that reached English because a small press decided they had to — a debut from Réunion, a Kuwaiti fable about a censor who starts reading, a Turkish cult novel from 1980. Nine independent presses, and a dozen translators worth knowing by name.

10 booksAugust 2026

01
Woodworm
Layla Martínez
Two Lines Press is the publishing arm of San Francisco's Center for the Art of Translation, and this is the best-looking book they have made — a red woodcut you will want facing out on the shelf. Translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott. Mariana Enríquez calls it a house built from poetry and revenge, which is about right.
02
There's a Monster Behind the Door
Gaëlle Bélem
Bullaun Press is a tiny operation in Sligo, the first Irish publisher working exclusively in translation, and this was only its fourth book. It went on to the International Booker longlist and won the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize for small presses. Translated from French by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert.
03
Underground Barbie
Maša Kolanović
Sandorf Passage publishes out of Zagreb and Los Angeles and brings Croatian writing into English almost single-handedly. Kolanović's novel appeared in Croatian in 2008; Ena Selimović's translation is its first outing in English. The cover — a Barbie hand rising out of the sand among plastic army men — is the whole book in one image.
04
The Book Censor's Library
Bothayna Al-Essa
Restless Books is a Brooklyn nonprofit built for exactly this kind of book. Al-Essa runs Takween, a bookstore and publishing house in Kuwait City, which gives the subject matter some weight. Translated from Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain.
05
Cold Nights of Childhood
Tezer Özlü
A cult book in Turkey for forty years and only recently in English, translated by Maureen Freely — Orhan Pamuk's translator — with an introduction by Ayşegül Savaş. Transit Books published it in the US, Serpent's Tail in the UK. The blue-tinted photograph of Istanbul on the cover earns its shelf space by itself.
06
Mending Bodies
Hon Lai Chu
Hon Lai Chu is one of Hong Kong's essential writers and barely available in English. The Chinese original is fifteen years old; Jacqueline Leung's translation makes its argument about forced union impossible to miss. The second Two Lines book on this list, and no apology for it.
07
Woman Running in the Mountains
Yūko Tsushima
Tsushima was Dazai Osamu's daughter and a far better novelist than that fact suggests. Geraldine Harcourt translated five of her books and understood the work better than anyone. NYRB Classics reissued it with an introduction by Lauren Groff, in the spine design that makes a shelf of them look like a collection.
08
The Joyful Song of the Partridge
Paulina Chiziane
Chiziane was the first woman to publish a novel in Mozambique and won the Camões Prize, the highest honour in Portuguese-language writing, in 2021. Archipelago Books makes the loveliest paperbacks in America — French flaps, near-square format, mustard yellow here. Translated by David Brookshaw.
09
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
Irene Solà
Solà writes in Catalan and is the most interesting novelist working in the language. Mara Faye Lethem's translation keeps the overheard, spoken-aloud quality of the original. Graywolf, a nonprofit press in Minneapolis, has been quietly right about writers for fifty years.
10
Phantom Pain Wings
Kim Hyesoon
The one book of poems here, and the reason to end on it. And Other Stories is a subscriber-funded press in Sheffield that publishes on conviction rather than projection. Don Mee Choi's translation comes with her own notes on the impossibility of the task — read those too.