Frustrated with struggle to find English translations or information about books that won non-English literary prizes

1 month ago 36

I love looking at various literary prizes for recommendations, and with Han Kang winning the Nobel Prize this year I ended up on a Wikipedia rabbit hole on the Yi Sang literary award which she won. And there seem to be so many fascinating authors there, but it seems that usually there is either no English translation of the book I can find or there is one, but it's basically impossible to find information about it, a blurb or reviews that would give you a sense what the book is about and whether you are interested in it.

To list some winners of the prize, Yun I-hyeong and Kim Chae-Won) look fascinating, but one only has one book translated in English (that's not even the one that won the prize) and the other one has no books. I had similar problems when trying to look into winners of the Jnanpith Award and Sahitya Academi Award (very little interest in English-speaking countries in Indian novels not originally written in English, in fact I've read whole articles about how the English-speaking world often talks as if the whole history of Indian novels consists only of English ones).

Even if a book is translated into English, I often find difficulty getting invested in the book or finding a reason to read it because what often motivates me to read books is blurbs that make it seem compelling or good reviews that make a good case for it, but those are usually absent in the books I find through international prizes. I know if I rely on a book being "hyped up" to buy it that inherently creates a bias towards books from certain parts of the world, but I just have trouble getting interested when there isn't a hook like a blurb or a review.

I just find it so frustrating that the literature community in the English-speaking world is so into literary prizes when they are English ones, talking endlessly about who wins the Pulitzer or the Booker, but not a single person talks about other languages' and countries' prizes to the point where there's not even enough interest to have the winners translated. I wonder if there is any way to make a petition to have some of these books translated, in the same way that people did with video games like Xenoblade and such, but no one ever makes these kinds of petitions for books. If only the whole world followed prizes from every country and language well enough to demand the winners get translated everywhere...

(Als on the topic of Korean books, I would really love to read Toji) and it seems widely considered a great work of literature, but sadly only the first out of five volumes is translated into English...

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