#Frauenzählen now counting coverage

Thanks to the Institute for Media Research at the University of Rostock, we now have a reliable pilot study on book review coverage and gender in the German press, radio and TV. It's only available in German as yet – at frauenzählen.de – but it is clear and will form a solid basis for future research. The study is similar to the VIDA count, except it's publicly funded and applies to a smaller market. The count was carried out in March of this year (a big month for spring book reviews).

I can't decide whether or not I'm surprised that the key figure maps neatly onto the stats on translations into English by gender: one third of review coverage goes to women, with men getting twice as much.

Men write more reviews than women, and most of the books they review were written by other men (74%). Women also review slightly more male-authored books than books by women, but they dedicate more column inches or air time to women's books when they do review them, so their coverage works out equal in the end. However, women critics get less space in the first place, compacting the problem. Only women's magazines give women's writing more coverage than men's.

In terms of genre, male and female-authored children's and YA books get equal coverage, while 70% of non-fiction reviews cover books by men. Crime writing reviews top the discrimination charts, with 76% dedicated to male-authored books. In the category the study calls "general Belletristik" – so probably fiction and literary non-fiction, the largest group garnering almost half the reviews – male authors pick up 61% of reviews.

Things will really get interesting in 2019, when the researchers will be able to add newly published books by author gender to the mix. We'll see then, I hope, what's going on inside publishing houses and whether women's writing is being ignored after publication or published less in the first place. Or both, perhaps. They might also have a chance to look at a range of intersectional factors, as VIDA has started doing, or at least think about gender in a less binary way.

The report is not exactly cheerful reading, but it's good that media editors can now calmly consider which books they cover and who they commission to review them. For improved finger-pointing purposes, it would be great to get breakdowns by publications – but with the state of play as it is, pretty much everybody's guilty anyway.  Have a great book fair!

Autumn 2018 Gender Stats

Hello there!

Just to let you know, I've updated my list of original German hardcover Belletristik (fiction, poetry, essays, and I think I included one collection of plays) in a selection of publishers' catalogues, counting up writers by gender. It is of course disheartening reading, with 54 books by women coming out at the same time as 90 written by men. That's 37.5% women, up half a percentage point from autumn 2016. As usual, genre fiction leans towards women, with dtv bringing out 7 female-authored and only 3 male-authored books this autumn, for instance. Literary fiction catalogues (Suhrkamp 2:10, Fischer 1:5, Diogenes 0:5, Hanser 1:4, KiWi 3:8, and so on) tend to do the opposite, heavily favouring men.

Here's something that certainly cheered me up, though: Hanser Berlin is publishing an anthology of women writing in German about sex and power, edited by Lina Muzur, on 23 July. Featuring Fatma Aydemir, Antonia Baum, Kristine Bilkau, Heike-Melba Fendel, Nora Gomringer, Annett Gröschner, Anna Katharina Hahn, Helene Hegemann, Margarita Iov, Mercedes Lauenstein, Juliane Liebert, Anna Prizkau, Annika Reich, Anke Stelling, Margarete Stokowski, Jackie Thomae and Julia Wolf. At least we have that.

Updated Stats on Women Published in German

Hello there. I've combed through the autumn catalogues to add to my ongoing stats on original German fiction by gender. Here's the table. I counted first-time hardcover publications written in German, classified by the publishers as "Belletristik", so broadly fiction, essays, poetry. There are 33 publishing houses in the count.

Some publishers are doing really well, publishing equal numbers of make and female (identifying) writers – dtv, DuMont, KiWi, Klett Cotta/Tropen. And some are even bringing out more books by women than by men this autumn: Aufbau, btb, CH Beck, List, Ullstein, Rütten & Loening and notably Matthes & Seitz, with three ladies in their German fiction/Naturkunden catalogue and only one dude.

Everyone else – not so much. There are twenty publishers publishing more men than women and eight houses not bringing us a single female German fiction writer this coming season. All in all, only 37% of original German fiction covered by my count was written by women.

All The Complaining in One Place

I've written several different articles on the subject of the lack of women in English translation recently. Here are all the links in one place, in order of writing:

Women in Translation: Not Just Bearded Dudes for Bearded Dudes at New Books in German

Women in Translation: Why Does It Matter? at Free Word Centre

Translated fiction by women must stop being a minority in a minority at The Guardian

Der Literaturbetrieb hat ein Problem mit Frauen at Zeit Online

If you'll be at the London Book Fair, we're having an informal meetup to think about how to improve the situation. All welcome: Thursday, 3:30 pm at the English PEN salon. I hope we can now talk some positive talk.

Happy New Stats

Happy 2016! I was in a less-than-creative mood anyway so I did some counting. I'm working on an article on gender imbalance in translated fiction for New Books in German. And I'd found it impossible to find any statistics on books published in German in the first place. So I combed a selection of publishers' catalogues from Spring 2016 and Fall 2015. For the purpose of comparison with other stats, I've included only fiction (novels, novellas, short story collections but no poetry, drama, essays or children's books) written in German and published for the first time. The publishers are thirty literary, genre, indie, major group-linked, small, large, medium houses – but of course this is by no means a comprehensive list. Anyway, here it is.

You'll notice the numbers are surprisingly low. Only 128 original German-language titles published in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in Spring 16, 144 in Fall 2015. Obviously that's because I haven't made any attempt to cover all publishers. But it's also because a lot of translations come out, especially fiction. In Germany in 2013, 11,894 published first editions fell under "German literature" and 6,164 literary translations were published, according to Buch und Buchhandel in Zahlen 2014.

Adding the two seasons together, books authored by women made up 43% of original fiction in my selection.

Going by a previous count of mine, about 30% of fiction translated from German to English was written by women. So something does seem to be getting lost along the way.

Women in Translation Update

Things are ticking over in the world of thinking about how and why women writers are underrepresented in translation, and how to change the situation. We had a panel on the subject at the London Book Fair in April. The video isn't online yet but I'll add it to this post when it is.

Then there was a panel in New York called “Who We Talk About When We Talk About Translation: Women’s Voices”. I've linked to the video, and Susan Bernofsky also wrote about the event at Translationista. There's some useful statistical material compiled for the event on the basis of the Three Percent data on translations published in the US, available online at Women in Translation.  In addition, Margaret Carson also provided these figures:

Of the titles in English translation last year: 

19% are by women authors translated by women (WA - WT)
13% are by women authors translated by men (WA - MT)
25% are by men authors translated by women (MA - WT)
43% are by men authors translated by men (MA - MT)

 Of the titles in translation by women authors: 

60% were translated by women, 40% by men

Of the titles in translation by men authors:

63% were translated by men, 37% by women

Very soon afterwards, Meytal Radzinski at Biblibio posted her own statistics on the US and some thoughts on what on earth is going on – plus some useful advice on what individuals can do about it. Interesting observations: in the US, the balance is better in poetry, and women don't actually dominate as translators.

I'm still interested in finding information on the gender balance in literary publications in other countries, but am finding it tough. So far, I have no reliable information on Germany, for instance, but I do have this article that I can't read on the Netherlands. The piece has statistics on literary fiction by women and men, saying that in 2012, only 35% of publications in this sector were written by women (about the same ratio as award nominations for women). That's not all that useful if we want to include "genre fiction" in our considerations, or indeed overcome these stupid categories in the first place. It also says something about books authored by women making up 51% of sales revenue. I think.  

So what I think we're looking at is an accumulation of biases. Sexism is a thing all over the world, with different faces in different countries and cultures. If we're honest we have to admit that women aren't being published as widely as men in many places, but we can also see that of those fewer published women writers, fewer are being translated into English. Because they're not thought of as appealing to a perceived readership, because they're not getting critics' attention, because they're not winning prizes, because they're not going on international residencies, because because because. But if we bear in mind that Amazon Crossing is the only US publisher to do more books by women than by men, we can assume the bias is not because they're selling fewer books.

More on the Ladies

It's so hard to separate out the chatter in the newspapers and concentrate on the sensible stuff, don't you find? But there have been two articles recently that look at sexism in the German literary world and what happens to women writers and journalists. The first came from Mara Delius and was an opinion piece on why she's a feminist. It rather went under because it was followed up in Die Welt by an opinion piece on why another woman journalist isn't a feminist. And Delius's article isn't exactly ground-breaking; I'd say that's because it's pretty common sense for women to be feminists, but hey, that's just me. What I did find useful, however, was the very last section, in which she mentions some of the horriblenesses that have happened to her at the newspaper and also the fact that there are no women in senior positions in their arts section.

Cut to Dana Buchzik, who caused more of a stir last autumn when she (or the Die Welt sub-editor) suggested that the answer to sexism in the German literary business was a gender quota for awards. Now, I wasn't a huge fan of that idea because I think it would play into the hands of reactionaries who labour under the false impression that women have it easier. But Buchzik actually picks up that idea (calling these people "sensitive young men") and runs with it in an article in the taz last week about, you guessed it, sexism in the German literary world. Essentially, both articles contain the same unsavoury list of discriminatory, sexist and patronizing incidents that have happened to women writers in Germany. Or perhaps it's a different list and the fact that it seems familiar is simply down to all this sexism being such a tiresomely omnipresent phenomenon.

Shall I repeat it? It'll put me in a bad mood. Buchzik writes about sexual propositions and groping, about the dismissal of women writers as inferior or confined to the twee and domestic, about the gender pay gap, the sparsity of women in senior roles in publishing houses and newspaper arts sections, men denying there is a problem, and of course about the disparity of review coverage. There is no VIDA-style count for German book criticism – not yet, she writes, making my mouth water slightly – so we don't know the full extent of that gulf.

In fact, I've been trying to gather statistics on women in German publishing. I haven't found a breakdown of how many books are written by women and how many by men. What I have found is that the Künstlersozialkasse (an insurance institution for artists) has ten per cent more women members than male in its "Word" section, which covers writers, journalists and translators. There's also this study by the BücherFrauen on women in publishing houses. And – surprise! – women make up the majority of staff but tend to hold lower positions and tend to earn less, especially if they've had babies, while fathers earn more. The gender pay gap is one of the largest by industry in Germany.

I'm hoping someone out there will hear Buchzik's call for reliable statistics to back up feminist arguments, providing figures on men and women critics in newspapers, men and women writers, and books reviewed. I'm also hoping that slimy men will stop being slimy, in the German book world and elsewhere, and that I never again see a young writer being introduced in person to a literary prize judge at an intimate late dinner by a publisher (guess the genders here), and I'm hoping all men will be really great and supportive and take women seriously and write decent reviews while trying to forget what the writer looks like and also promote women in their departments and suggest women for jobs and never use the word Fräulein ever ever ever. So that women can just get on with being excellent.

Some More Statistics on Translated Fiction

As you may know I'm part of a team trying to get a prize off the ground for fiction by women in translation. We've all noticed that books by women don't get translated as often as books by men, and we're still puzzling over why that is and what can be done about it. But in order to make our case more convincingly, we need some statistics. 

So for that purpose, I’ve done a count of books published in the UK and Ireland in 2013. I culled the main part from the British Library catalogue by searching with “translated by” and “translated from” and “2013”. Because we want to look at fiction in a fairly limited sense for our prize, I didn’t include children’s or YA books, poetry, plays, reprints/reissues or memoir/literary non-fiction (for example, Florian Illes’ 1913 is not included). I did include books published by houses based elsewhere but with a UK/Ire office (Seagull, Dalkey Archive, Europa Editions). It was immediately obvious that there were some titles missing, so I also looked at those catalogues I found online for 2013 from publishers that were already on the list, plus things like an English PEN blog piece featuring UK editors talking about the translations they were looking forward to publishing in 2013. I’m certain there are still gaps in the list, but here it is:

List of UK/Ireland-published translated fiction, 2013

There are now 307 books in total, 82 of them written by women (in the case of anthologies, they all included more men than women so I counted them as male). That gives us a figure of 27%.

I also went through the stats collected by Literature Across Frontiers, on translated literature published in the UK and Ireland in the years 2000 and 2008. This data is different to my list for a number of reasons: It includes children’s books, translated books on literature, poetry, plays, reissues and a few duplicates like large-print editions. For our purposes, I only listed each name once, even when a writer had several books out in one year, and I didn’t include writers where I was unable to establish via a quick search whether they were men or women. I also left out Latin, ancient Greek, Old Norse and Old English, because I figured women really couldn’t write in those days.

For both years, 24% of the authors whose books were translated into English were women.

Here are a few observations I’ve picked up along the way:

Women writers are better represented in translated children’s books and crime fiction.
Northern European women are better represented than women writers from other parts of the world.
In 2013, I found no translated fiction by Russian women but all three Greek writers I found were women.
In the literatures that are traditionally more heavily imported, 13 women were translated from German (out of 44), 12 from French (out of 52), 7 from Italian (out of 28) and 6 from Spanish (out of 25). Yay German!
Classics tend to be a male-only domain (no surprises there).

I haven’t found any international statistics on books originally published in the various languages. My assumption though is that the imbalance in part reflects that women are actually published less in certain cultures. However, they are also less recognized in most literary cultures (as in the Anglophone world), which adds to the imbalance.

I'd like to ask people, translators and publishing people especially, to take a look at my list via the first link above and check whether there are any books missing. You can let me know in the comments section. Many thanks - and enjoy browsing!

Stats (German Books into English)

It's really hard to find out how many books get translated into English every year as a whole, and harder still to break them down by type. We have the Three Percent lists for the States, which cover first-time translations of fiction and poetry. And for the UK and Ireland, there are stats for the years 2000, 2005 and 2008, collected and published by Literature Across Frontiers.

So I was glad, at least, to find reliable-looking information on foreign rights sales of titles to different countries from Germany, in the stolidly informative publication Buch und Buchhandel in Zahlen 2014.

Rights sales as a whole are down from a peak in 2007, when 9225 titles were sold abroad by German publishers. In 2013 there were 6466 sales. The top buyers were China, Spain and Italy. 158 books sold to British publishers, none to Ireland, 9 to Canada, 196 to the USA, and 8 to Australia and New Zealand. That's just plain books. Both American and British publishers bought in more German books than in 2012, and 106 of the sales into English-language territories were literary titles. Here's an extract from one of the book's tables, breaking down what kind of books are getting translated from German to English:

Type of book	Rights sales to English-language publishers, 2013
Adult literature total	106
Narrative fiction	82
Thrillers	12
SF, fantasy	0
Poetry, drama	10
Comic, humour, satire	2
Children’s/YA total	31
Picture books	15
Early readers	3
Up to age 11	0
Age 12 and up	5
Children’s non-fiction	7
Travel	12
Self-help	53
Humanities, arts, music total	15
Natural sciences total	104
General sciences	45
Technology	39
Medicine	9
Social sciences, law, economics	15
School and learning	5
Other non-fiction	39
Total	444

Only Italy bought more rights to fiction titles in 2013 (115), with France and Spain buying 103 apiece. One reason for the comparatively high numbers is that there are six different countries doing the buying when you consider Anglophone publishing as a whole, but it's definitely a good thing for German writers because a publication in English means people in other countries, particularly editors, can also read their books.   

These figures apply to German publishers only, not those based in Switzerland or Austria.

BTBA Longlist / Four Point Five Percent

First of all, the fiction longlist for the Best Translated Book Award has been announced - and includes four books translated from German:

Awakening to the Great Sleep War by Gert Jonke, translated from the German by Jean M. Snook (Dalkey Archive Press; Austria)

The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller, translated from the German by Philip Boehm (Metropolitan Books; Romania)

Island of Second Sight by Albert Vigoleis Thelen, translated from the German by Donald O. White (Overlook; Germany)

My Father’s Book by Urs Widmer, translated from the German by Donal McLaughlin (Seagull Books; Switzerland)

My fingers are crossed quite hard, although not equally for all four.

And then, speaking of Three Percent, Literature Across Frontiers has published a report on translation statistics in the UK and Ireland. At last, someone's done a study - and come up with some figures. According to LAF, translations constitute 2.5% of published titles (all literary genres including biography, literary criticism and others) and 4.5% of published literary titles (fiction, poetry and drama) in the UK and Ireland. German was the second-most translated language in the years under review (after French and before Spanish). The study used data from the British Library, which is more reliable than the Index Translationum for various reasons, as the author reports.

I've oversimplified. The two categories in particular are more complicated and especially interesting for anyone who's worked in a library with the Dewey Decimal system - oh those 800s! The main part of the study is only 28 pages long and well worth a read - especially for publishers. There are some great appendices too including useful resources - a list of publishers who do translations, for instance. Here's my favourite quote:

As previous reports have shown, the status of the translators themselves is precarious in the UK, with reviewers, for example, sometimes even failing to mention that the work is a translation, and failing to name the translator. Publishers play the most important role in raising the profile of translators and translation – and in this apparently small matter, they can make a significant difference.

The small matter is providing the industry with detailed data, but obviously publishers can and do make all sorts of significant differences.