World Literature.

A first wordWhat is world literature?

Almost everything you have not yet read. The English-speaking world publishes roughly 3% of its books in translation; in France, the figure is over 20%; in Germany, 12%; in Korea and Sweden, around 25%. The Anglophone reader's literary map is, by default, missing most of the world.

This deck is a guided correction. It moves region by region — Arabic, Persian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, South-East Asian, African, Caribbean, Latin American, Northern and Eastern European, indigenous — and names the writers, the books, and the translators most worth seeking out. It does not claim to be exhaustive. No deck of twenty-seven pages could be.

Read by tradition, not by token. Read enough novels from one place to feel its arguments with itself. Then move to the next.

Chapter IThe translation question.

Most great novels were written in a language you cannot read. That is the central fact of world literature. What survives translation: plot, character, structural argument, most imagery, the rhythm of paragraphs. What is risky: tone, prose music, idiom-density, dialect, wordplay, the relationship of the prose to its native literary tradition.

Each generation re-translates. Constance Garnett brought the Russians into English between 1900 and 1925 — her versions formed an entire generation's idea of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Pevear and Volokhonsky retranslated the same books from the 1990s and produced a quarrel that has not stopped. Edith Grossman gave Don Quixote a 2003 English translation that is now standard. Royall Tyler's 2001 Genji is the present gold-standard of that book in English.

A translator can also miscarry. Deborah Smith's 2015 English version of Han Kang's The Vegetarian won the International Booker; it was later shown to contain dozens of substantive changes. The book remained great. The translation became famous as much for the controversy as for the prose.

Chapter IIThe Arabic tradition.

The Arabic literary tradition begins in oral pre-Islamic poetry — the Mu'allaqat, the seven hanging odes — and stretches through fourteen centuries of poets, prose stylists, and storytellers. One Thousand and One Nights is the form's best-known artefact in the West, but the canon is much larger.

The 20th-century Arabic novel begins with Egyptian writers — Tawfiq al-Hakim, Yusuf Idris — and reaches first global recognition with Naguib Mahfouz, who won the Nobel in 1988. His Cairo Trilogy (1956–57) follows three generations of one family from 1917 to 1944; Children of the Alley (1959) caused enough religious controversy to be banned in Egypt for decades.

Read after Mahfouz

The Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North (1966) — the great post-colonial Arabic novel. The Lebanese Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun (1998) — Palestinian dispossession in oral history form. Hoda Barakat won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2019. The Syrian poet Adonis is the great living modernist of the language.

Chapter IIIPersian.

Classical Persian poetry is one of the world's great traditions. Ferdowsi's Shahnameh (completed 1010) — the Book of Kings — is a 60,000-couplet national epic, written in pure Persian, that has held the Iranian linguistic identity together for a thousand years. Rumi's Masnavi is the central Sufi work; Hafez's ghazals are still read aloud at Iranian New Year. Coleman Barks has popularised English Rumi, but the Reynold A. Nicholson and Jawid Mojaddedi translations are closer to the originals.

Modern Persian

The 20th-century classic is Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl (1937) — a 90-page hallucinatory novella in the Kafkaesque mode. Forough Farrokhzad (1934–67) was the major modern poet, dying at 32. Sadeq Chubak's The Patient Stone and Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's The Colonel are the major novels. Diasporic writers include Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) and Dina Nayeri.

Chapter IVRussian, beyond the giants.

Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (written 1928–40, published 1966–67) — the devil arrives in Soviet Moscow; a satirical, magical, theological novel that Salman Rushdie has called one of the inspirations for his own work. Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit (1930) and Soul — flat, pre-postmodern Soviet prose, almost untranslatable; Robert Chandler's English versions are heroic.

Poets of the catastrophe

Anna Akhmatova's Requiem (composed 1935–40, memorised in fragments by friends to evade the censors) — a poem-cycle on Stalin's Terror. Osip Mandelstam's late poems were similarly held in human memory. Joseph Brodsky, exiled in 1972, became the great Russian poet of the late 20th century in two languages and won the Nobel in 1987.

Late Soviet and after

Lyudmila Ulitskaya's family novels; Vladimir Sorokin's post-Soviet dystopias; Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel in 2015 for her oral histories of Soviet collapse (Secondhand Time).

Chapter VChinese.

The pre-modern Chinese novel is enormous. Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao Xueqin, c. 1760) is 120 chapters, 400 named characters, and the consensus answer to "the greatest Chinese novel." David Hawkes and John Minford's five-volume Penguin translation (1973–86) is the standard English version.

Modern

Lu Xun (1881–1936) wrote the founding modern Chinese fictions — The True Story of Ah Q, A Madman's Diary. Eileen Chang's Lust, Caution and Love in a Fallen City. Mo Yan won the Nobel in 2012 (Red Sorghum, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out); Yan Lianke's satires of contemporary China have made him perpetually shortlisted; Yu Hua's To Live and Brothers; Can Xue's formally radical fictions; Liu Cixin's sf trilogy Three-Body Problem made Chinese sf global. Howard Goldblatt is the major living English translator from Chinese.

Chapter VIJapanese.

The classical anchor is the Heian-period prose: Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji (c. 1010), Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book. The 17th century gave the haiku of Bashō. The modern novel begins with Natsume Sōseki (Kokoro, 1914) and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (The Makioka Sisters, 1948).

Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country (1948) and The Sound of the Mountain (1954) — Nobel 1968. Yukio Mishima's tetralogy The Sea of Fertility (1965–71) — completed the day he committed seppuku. Kenzaburō Ōe's A Personal Matter (1964) — Nobel 1994.

Late 20th c. and now

Haruki Murakami — global since Norwegian Wood (1987). Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police, The Housekeeper and the Professor. Mieko Kawakami's Breasts and Eggs. Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman. Yoko Tawada writes in Japanese and German. Translators: Jay Rubin, Philip Gabriel, Ted Goossen, Sam Bett, David Boyd.

Chapter VIIKorean.

South Korean fiction has, in the last fifteen years, become one of the most-translated bodies of work in world literature. The major figure is Han Kang (Nobel 2024); Human Acts, set during the Gwangju massacre of 1980, is the central novel. Hwang Sok-yong is the older, politically committed master — The Guest, The Ancient Garden. Bae Suah's formally restless novellas (Recitation, Untold Night and Day); Bora Chung's genre-bent stories (Cursed Bunny); Pyun Hye-young; Kim Hye-jin. Min Jin Lee's Pachinko tracks four generations of a Korean family in Japan and is written in English.

Translators: Deborah Smith (controversial but central), Anton Hur, Janet Hong, Sora Kim-Russell.

Chapter VIIISouth Asian.

Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel in 1913 — the first non-European laureate. Gitanjali, The Home and the World. Premchand's Hindi-Urdu novels (Godan, 1936). R. K. Narayan's Malgudi novels. Mahasweta Devi wrote the great Bengali political fiction (Mother of 1084, Breast Stories; Spivak's translations). Saadat Hasan Manto's Partition stories — the most concentrated short fiction the subcontinent has produced.

Modern Anglophone

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981, Booker; Best of the Bookers 1993, 2008). Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997, Booker). Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies trilogy. Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999, Pulitzer). Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire. Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand won the International Booker in 2022 — the first Hindi-language winner.

Chapter IXAfrican.

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) — the foundational African novel in English; the Igbo village of Umuofia in the moments before British colonisation. Wole Soyinka (Nigeria, Nobel 1986) — playwright and essayist; Death and the King's Horseman. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Kenya) — A Grain of Wheat; gave up English for Gĩkũyũ in 1977.

The next generations

Bessie Head (Botswana/South Africa). Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988). J. M. Coetzee (South Africa, Nobel 2003) — Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians. Nadine Gordimer (Nobel 1991). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Americanah (2013). Maaza Mengiste's The Shadow King (2019). NoViolet Bulawayo's Glory (2022). Petina Gappah; Yaa Gyasi; Damon Galgut (Booker 2021); Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania-UK, Nobel 2021).

Chapter XCaribbean.

Caribbean literature in English is dense for the population it represents. Derek Walcott's long career; V. S. Naipaul's travel-essay-novels (A House for Mr Biswas, 1961). Jamaica Kincaid's short fictions and essays (A Small Place, 1988). Earl Lovelace's Salt. Edwidge Danticat (Haiti) — Krik? Krak!, The Farming of Bones. Marlon James (Jamaica) — A Brief History of Seven Killings (Booker 2015). Marie-Hélène Lafon; Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe); Édouard Glissant's essays on creolisation.

Reading order

Begin with Kincaid's A Small Place, a short essay that frames the colonial argument. Then A House for Mr Biswas; then Omeros; then Marlon James.

Chapter XILatin American, after the Boom.

The Boom (García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Fuentes) is covered in the Novels deck. Beyond it: Jorge Luis Borges's Ficciones (1944) and Labyrinths — short stories that read like philosophy. Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G. H. (1964); Benjamin Moser's biography Why This World revived her in English. Roberto Bolaño's 2666.

Now

Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream; Mariana Enriquez's horror stories (Things We Lost in the Fire); Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive; Yuri Herrera's short Mexican fictions; Alejandro Zambra's Bonsai, Chilean Poet; Andrés Neuman's Traveler of the Century. The Spanish-language counter-canon now includes Javier Marías (Spain, A Heart So White) and the Cuban-American Cristina García.

Chapter XIINorthern Europe.

Karl Ove Knausgård's six-volume My Struggle (2009–11) is the central contemporary Norwegian work. Older: Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890), Sigrid Undset's medieval-historical Kristin Lavransdatter, Tarjei Vesaas's The Ice Palace.

Across the Nordic region

Sweden: Selma Lagerlöf (Nobel 1909), Astrid Lindgren, Henning Mankell's Wallander novels, Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, Karin Boye's Kallocain. Denmark: Tove Ditlevsen's Copenhagen Trilogy (1967–71, English 2021). Iceland: Halldór Laxness (Nobel 1955) — Independent People; Sjón; Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir. Finland: Tove Jansson (the adult novels, not just Moomins); Sofi Oksanen's Purge.

Chapter XIIIEastern Europe.

Poland: Czesław Miłosz (Nobel 1980), Wisława Szymborska (Nobel 1996), Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski. Olga Tokarczuk. Hungary: Imre Kertész (Nobel 2002, Fatelessness), Péter Nádas (A Book of Memories), László Krasznahorkai (Satantango; International Booker 2015 and 2025), Magda Szabó's The Door.

Czech & Romanian and the Yugoslav inheritance

Czech: Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude; Milan Kundera; Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (which gave us the word robot). Romanian: Herta Müller (Nobel 2009), Norman Manea, Mircea Cărtărescu. Yugoslav successor literatures: Ivo Andrić (Nobel 1961), Danilo Kiš, Aleksandar Hemon (writes in English).

Chapter XIVSouth-East Asia and the Pacific.

Indonesia: Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet (written in prison, dictated, smuggled out) — the great 20th-century Indonesian novel. Eka Kurniawan's Beauty Is a Wound (2002). Vietnam: Bảo Ninh's The Sorrow of War; Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai's The Mountains Sing; Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (US-based). Philippines: F. Sionil José's Rosales saga; Miguel Syjuco's Ilustrado.

Pacific

Australia: Patrick White (Nobel 1973), David Malouf, Tim Winton, Alexis Wright (Indigenous, Carpentaria), Richard Flanagan (Booker 2014), Gerald Murnane. New Zealand: Janet Frame's An Angel at My Table; Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (Booker 2013); Witi Ihimaera's Māori novels. Hawaiian and Samoan literatures are growing in English presence.

Chapter XVHebrew literature, modern.

S. Y. Agnon (Nobel 1966) — the great early-modern Hebrew prose stylist. Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002) — autobiographical novel, perhaps the most-read Israeli book in translation. David Grossman's To the End of the Land (2008) and A Horse Walks into a Bar (2014, International Booker 2017). Aharon Appelfeld's 47 books on memory and the Holocaust. Etgar Keret's short stories. Yehoshua Kenaz's Infiltration.

Arabic-language Israeli writers — Sayed Kashua, Anton Shammas — write a literature that complicates the linguistic identity of the country.

Chapter XVIIndigenous literatures.

North American: Louise Erdrich's Ojibwe novels (Love Medicine, The Round House, The Sentence). Tommy Orange's There There (2018) and Wandering Stars (2024). Joy Harjo (US Poet Laureate 2019–22). N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968 Pulitzer). Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. Tommy Pico; Layli Long Soldier's Whereas.

Other continents

Australia: Alexis Wright's Waanyi novels — Carpentaria, Praiseworthy; Kim Scott; Tara June Winch. New Zealand: Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider; Patricia Grace. Latin America: Mapuche, K'iche', Quechua poetry — much of it bilingual or multilingual. Humberto Ak'abal (K'iche' Maya). The pan-Indigenous publishing project The Reservation magazine.

Chapter XVIIThe Nobel question.

The Swedish Academy has awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 121 times since 1901. Until the 2010s, the prize skewed European; since 2008, more than half the laureates have been from outside Europe or North America.

The notable absences

The list of writers the Academy did not honour is, by general agreement, more distinguished than the list of laureates of any given decade: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Borges, Nabokov, Auden, Greene, Calvino, Achebe, Murakami, Roth, DeLillo, Pynchon, Atwood. The reasons are political, aesthetic, personal, and accidental in roughly equal measure.

The point is not that the prize is the truth of literary value. The point is that following its choices, year by year, is a useful guided tour of writers from places one's reading might not otherwise reach.

Chapter XVIIITranslators worth following.

From the Russians

Pevear & Volokhonsky (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov), Robert Chandler (Platonov, Grossman), Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Tokarczuk, Polish in general), Antonia W. Bouis.

From the Romance languages

Lydia Davis (Proust, Flaubert), Edith Grossman (Cervantes, García Márquez), Margaret Jull Costa (Saramago, Marías), Megan McDowell (Schweblin, Enriquez, Zambra), Natasha Wimmer (Bolaño), Lisa Dillman (Yuri Herrera).

From East Asian languages

Royall Tyler (Genji), Jay Rubin, Philip Gabriel, Ted Goossen (Murakami), Howard Goldblatt (Mo Yan and most modern Chinese), Anton Hur (Korean), Janet Hong.

From the Germanic and Scandinavian

Susan Bernofsky (Walser, Erpenbeck), Michael Hofmann (Roth, Kafka, Erpenbeck), Don Bartlett (Knausgård), Misha Hoekstra, Tiina Nunnally.

Chapter XIXTwenty-eight from the world.

• c.1010The Tale of Genji (Tyler trans.)Murasaki Shikibu · JP
• 1933Independent PeopleHalldór Laxness · IS
• 1937The Blind OwlSadegh Hedayat · IR
• 1947The Cairo TrilogyNaguib Mahfouz · EG
• 1958Things Fall ApartChinua Achebe · NG
• 1964The Passion According to G. H.Clarice Lispector · BR
• 1966Season of Migration to the NorthTayeb Salih · SD
• 1966The Master and MargaritaMikhail Bulgakov · RU
• 1967One Hundred Years of SolitudeGarcía Márquez · CO
• 1968Kristin LavransdatterSigrid Undset · NO
• 1980This Earth of MankindPramoedya Ananta Toer · ID
• 1988Nervous ConditionsTsitsi Dangarembga · ZW
• 1990OmerosDerek Walcott · LC
• 1990The Sorrow of WarBảo Ninh · VN
• 1997The God of Small ThingsArundhati Roy · IN
• 1998The Savage DetectivesRoberto Bolaño · CL
• 2002A Tale of Love and DarknessAmos Oz · IL
• 2002Beauty Is a WoundEka Kurniawan · ID
• 2006Half of a Yellow SunAdichie · NG
• 2007The VegetarianHan Kang · KR
• 2008To the End of the LandDavid Grossman · IL
• 2014Human ActsHan Kang · KR
• 2014The Books of JacobOlga Tokarczuk · PL
• 2018The Old DriftNamwali Serpell · ZM
• 2019The Shadow KingMaaza Mengiste · ET
• 2021The Books of Jacob (Eng.)Tokarczuk · PL
• 2022Tomb of SandGeetanjali Shree · IN
• 2024We Do Not PartHan Kang · KR

Chapter XXThe forms outside the novel.

Poetry in translation

Wisława Szymborska, Mahmoud Darwish, Yehuda Amichai, Claribel Alegría, Adonis, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Anna Akhmatova, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Wang Wei, Du Fu, Li Bai (in translations by Burton Watson, David Hinton, A. C. Graham). World poetry circulates more easily than world prose; the loss of music in translation is real, but so is the survival.

The essay

Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude on Mexican identity. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). V. S. Naipaul's travel-essays. Wisława Szymborska's book reviews. Anne Carson writes essay-poems.

Memoir

Annie Ernaux (Nobel 2022) is the great living example, but the form is global: Edwidge Danticat, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sayaka Murata's essays, Mary Karr's American example.

Chapter XXIWhere to keep reading.

Magazines

Asymptote — quarterly, multilingual, with original-text-and-translation pages. Words Without Borders — non-profit, monthly, by region. Granta — issues built around translated work (the Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2010 and 2021 lists are useful starting points). The Paris Review's "Art of Translation" interviews.

Prizes

The Nobel Prize in Literature. The International Booker (translated fiction, since 2016 in current form). The PEN Translation Prize. The Republic of Consciousness Prize (small-press fiction, often translated). The Neustadt Prize. National prizes — Goncourt (France), Strega (Italy), Naoki and Akutagawa (Japan), Premio Cervantes (Spanish-language) — are all useful guides.

Independent presses

Archipelago, Open Letter, And Other Stories, Dalkey Archive, Tilted Axis, Charco, Two Lines, Fitzcarraldo, NYRB Classics. The independent press is doing the bulk of the world-literature work in English.

Chapter XXIIWatch & read.

↑ Han Kang · Nobel Lecture 2024 · "Light and Thread"

More on YouTube

Watch · Gabriel García Márquez · TIME profile
Watch · Crash Course Literature · Things Fall Apart

Read about translation

David Bellos's Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (2011). David Damrosch's What Is World Literature? (2003). Edith Grossman's Why Translation Matters (2010). Tim Parks's Translating Style (1998). Kate Briggs's This Little Art (2017).

Chapter XXIIIWhat this deck did not cover.

Whole regions are missing. The literatures of Central Asia (Uzbek, Kazakh, Tajik); the Caucasus (Armenian, Georgian, Azerbaijani); Southern Africa beyond South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Botswana; the smaller languages of South Asia. The Indian-language fiction beyond Hindi, Bengali, and Tamil. Most of Lusophone Africa.

Many of these traditions are present in their own languages but barely visible in English. The list of writers who deserve to be translated and have not been is far longer than the list in this deck. Asymptote, Tilted Axis, Words Without Borders, and the PEN Translates programme are all working on this; the work is slow and worth supporting.

The deck should be read as an invitation, not a closure. Pick one country whose literature you have read least; pick one of its writers from this deck; read that writer's most-praised book; then a second; then a third. By the third book you will be reading from inside a tradition rather than outside it. That is when world literature becomes a useful thing.

Chapter XXIVAn invitation.

You will not run out. World literature contains more than you can read in your remaining years. The pleasure of it is that the work is constantly arriving — translated for the first time, retranslated, written this year in a country whose literature you do not know.

"Literature is one of the most agreeable shortcuts science has yet found to teach us how the human heart works."— Mario Vargas Llosa

Three small commitments are enough to maintain this. First: when buying a book, check whether it is translated, and from where. Second: read the translator's name and remember it. Third: when you find a writer you love in translation, read other writers their translator has worked on; the taste maps reliably.

The next two pages are the colophon and a short list of further reading. Then the deck closes.