What are some upcoming trends for the next year?

The prominence and popularity of literature in translation is definitely trending! We’re seeing more titles in translation on bestseller lists, and the National Book Award has added a category specifically for books in translation.

Amazon Crossing, the literature in translation imprint of Amazon Publishing, has translated over 400 books into English by authors from 37 countries and 23 languages. We’re the largest publisher of translated fiction in the United States, and our goal is to introduce readers to authors from around the world with translations of foreign language books, making award-winning, bestselling, and important contemporary books accessible to many readers for the first time.

We’ve seen iconic authors from other cultures develop passionate readerships in English. Marc Levy, France’s most read contemporary author, has found a new fan base over the past two years with his novels P.S. from Paris, The Last of the Stanfields, and All Those Things We Never Said. And the fantastic response to our acquisition announcement for The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson’s Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin by Swedish author Jan Stocklassa, translated by Tara F. Chace, shows the appeal across cultures and languages of a great true-crime story.

What book/genre/topic would you like to see cross your transom?

I’m always excited to get stories from or about little-heard-from communities, languages, or groups. I’m currently working on the biography The Boy Between Worlds by Annejet van der Zijl, about a Surinamese-Dutch boy, Waldemar Nods, who lost his remarkable parents in the Nazi concentration camps in World War II. The Dutch author’s first book in English, An American Princess, was lauded as one of the best books of 2018 by Hilary Mantel.

My north star is books, both fiction and nonfiction, that I can see a diverse group of smart readers devouring, books that I myself long to get back to or lend, the ones that make you feel better informed or feel more deeply human by inhabiting someone else’s experience. Mona in Three Acts, a novel I am working on for the fall, is a family drama about a specifically female journey into adulthood that has made Flemish author Griet op de Beeck a cultural icon in her native language, selling out her personal appearances and creating legions of rabid readers. Another fall title, Return to the Enchanted Island by Madagascar author Johary Ravaloson, won my heart in that it’s not just one boy’s coming-of-age story. It’s really about the entire country of Madagascar searching for a meaningful place in contemporary global society.

I would love to see more books that have been culturally important to their readers in native African languages—we don’t hear a lot of those voices in the Americas. Amazon Crossing actually has a submissions website where anyone can propose a title for translation. So if you’ve read something you can’t forget in Swahili or Hausa or Yoruba, etc.—our editorial team wants to learn about it! 

What topic don’t you ever want to see again?

Titles where the biggest selling point is that they are exactly like something else, but from another country, leave me a little unmoved. Elena Ferrante is great, Haruki Murakami is captivating, but the reasons that their works resonate with people are not things that we can simply transpose. We use other works as shorthand when trying to communicate about what audiences might be drawn to in a work, but there are usually more intrinsically meaningful qualities to any work than just its similarity to something else.

I am working on a novel in translation for next summer that isn’t at all like Ferrante but that Ferrante readers will enjoy: The First Mrs. Rothschild by Israeli author Sara Aharoni. Set in the Judengasse (Jewish Quarter) in Frankfurt in the Napoleonic era, the book follows the story of the main character, Gutle, and her neighbors over her centurylong life. Like Ferrante, Aharoni writes impressively about both politics and friendships, but the lives of their protagonists are completely different.

What do you want to change about publishing?

I’d love to see translators get broader recognition across the industry. As a translator-friendly publishing house, Amazon Crossing features the translator’s name on all our covers. We’re committed to a high level of involvement from our authors and our translators in the publishing process. There’s an industrywide opportunity to invest more energy and attention to this area of literature.

What’s unique about your corner of the publishing industry?

Working in the field of translated literature is in itself somewhat unique, given the relatively low percentage of works from other languages and cultures that we read in English—the often cited “3 percent problem” detailed by Chad Post at the University of Rochester.

I get the chance to be deeply involved in the translation community, too. For example, my Amazon Crossing colleagues and I attend the American Literary Translators Association conference each year and meet with translation groups at the local level. At the London Book Fair in March, I was on a panel in the Translation Centre with Norwegian author Demian Vitanza (This Life or the Next) and Publishing Perspectives’ Porter Anderson.

The kinds of people I get to meet and work with throughout the translation community—foreign rights agents, publishers, translators from all parts of the globe—are pretty polyphonic and extraordinary.

Elizabeth DeNoma is a senior editor on the Amazon Crossing team. Some of her bestselling acquisitions include P.S. from Paris by French author Marc Levy, The Light of the Fireflies by Spanish author Paul Pen, The House by the River by Greek author Lena Manta, and An American Princess by Dutch author Annejet van der Zijl. Elizabeth regularly leads panels at publishing industry events such as the London Book Fair, BookExpo, and the American Literary Translators Association. Prior to joining Amazon Crossing, Elizabeth completed her Ph.D. in Scandinavian languages and literature at the University of Washington and taught for several years at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Her dissertation focused on the intertextual relationship between the literary works of Selma Lagerlof and their film adaptations in the silent and sound eras. Elizabeth lives with her family in Seattle, where she can be found in or on the water whenever the weather permits.