#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!

Mireille Gansel: Translation as Transhumance, tr. Ros Schwartz

Here is something like a translation memoir, the story of Mireille Gansel’s multiple and changing relationships to various languages and to the act of translation. The author begins, in delicate prose, with stories of Hungarian and German in her French childhood. Gansel comes from a Jewish mitteleuropäische family spread across exiles in Europe and Israel, who speak Hungarian (which she does not understand as a child, but loves to hear her father translate aloud) and the German of the pre-Nazi Austro-Hungarian empire. She writes beautifully about the inflections of Czech, Yiddish and Hebrew in her relatives’ accents, their language as a relic of history. Her translator Ros Schwartz has given us a polished rendering, letting the author’s precise and considered voice shine through and always staying this side of kitsch, but I would have expected no less from her.

Gansel learns German at school and goes on to study it and eventually translate its poetry, but for her, language is a literary medium that has a deep association with the individuals who speak it. Transhumance means taking sheep from one pasture to another, but every time I read it the word human stands out – a productive misunderstanding. Writing about the poets she has translated, Gansel tells us very personal stories about them. How she discovered their work, what happened when they met (if they were still alive), what influenced them, the melodies of their verses and voices. Her repeated query is: How was I to translate this? Each writer necessitates a different approach. It seems almost to be a question of passing a poem between two human beings, and to do so Gansel seeks a close understanding of the work and its creator, spending time with them and then finding the fitting place to translate.

Gansel writes fascinatingly about her work in Vietnam on Vietnamese poetry, taking a new tack as bombs were falling during the 1970s. Her translator Ros Schwartz told me: “A good translation doesn’t colonise the work but preserves the joys and beauties of its ‘otherness’ without resorting to weird foreignization.” Gansel herself quotes the translator Nguyen Khac Vien’s guiding principle: “‘Staying faithful means first and foremost seeking to recreate the work’s humanity, its universality.’ An approach that meant liberation from all forms of exoticism, appropriation, and the cultural and spiritual annexation characteristic of the translations produced under colonisation.” She does just that, not only in her translations but in the way she thinks about poetry and people, moving directly from the Vietnamese To Huu’s lines on casuarina forests to Brecht’s thoughts on the near-criminality of talking about trees in difficult times – though conditions are very different in a country stripped of vegetation by Agent Orange.

To help her work on the texts of minority language-speakers in the Vietnamese mountains, she looks to field ethnology gathering spoken language in the Alps, “absorbing the rhythms and cadences of those words and voices, discovering an entire register of expressions, accents and constructions.” All this helps her to understand the nature of orality and form. People, I understand from her working method, are human wherever they are. That shepherding metaphor has at its heart a sense of less crossing but rather ignoring and defying boundaries. Over its long history, German has been spoken across shifting political borders and overlapping with other languages, as Gansel points out, making the notion of pinning language to nationality a fallacy.

That helps, I’m convinced, to reclaim German from its abuse by fascists, as Brecht did and as many exiled writers attempted, including Nelly Sachs, whom Gansel translated with great care. It’s hard for me to judge her work in this instance without understanding French; by necessity, the book uses various translators’ English renderings, which vary in effectiveness. But the questions she raises, of how to capture Sachs’s dense Hebrew-infused poetry, are fascinating. In the face of repeated right-wing calls for everyone living in Germany to adhere to an ill-defined Leitkultur, asserting a pluralist vision of German language, literature and culture is still a key task. The “German-speaking world” is a place where many languages are spoken, now too, and where those languages permeate each other to produce exciting writing, influenced far more widely than by any standard canon. Mireille Gansel reminds us that the world is more complex and wonderful than those who call for a single dominant national culture would have us believe.

That, and her lessons about taking great time and care over the human aspect of translation, will stay with me for a long time to come.

Women in Translation: a Podcast

Welcome to August 2016! I spent yesterday making my way home from the UK after the BCLT summer school, an extravaganza of literary translation and creative writing in the holiday-time haven of the University of East Anglia. Aside from leading a group of very talented people working on rendering passages from Rasha Khayat's novel Weil wir längst woanders sind into English, I also chaired a panel discussion. Three guesses what it was about – women in translation.

You can hear me talking to the publishers Laura Barber (Portobello) and Deborah Smith (Tilted Axis) and the publicity, marketing and sales person Nicky Smalley (And Other Stories) in a podcast. We covered a few topics: what they actually do all day long, the year of publishing women, how they market translations by women, how they find books... and what we can do to change the bizarre imbalance. Enjoy.

Women in Translation Month 2016: an Introduction

Did you know that less than a third of all literary translations published in the UK and the US were originally written by women? Did you know that women writers win far fewer prizes for their translated books than male writers?

Women in Translation Month is all about appreciating the great women writers who do get translated – and of course the people who bring them to us, their translators and publishers. It’s an opportunity to join in a worldwide conversation about outstanding writing from all over the globe. Bookshops and libraries in the UK, US, Germany, France and New Zealand are highlighting translated books by women. Bloggers are sharing their impressions, the twitterati are pulling together under #WITMonth, and anyone can be part of it just by reading a book.

With only 30% of translated fiction being female-authored, it’s a safe bet that those books by women that do get translated are genuinely excellent. Women around the world are writing explicitly feminist fiction like Angélica Gorodischer from Argentina, bringing us family stories like France’s Marie NDiaye, exploring historical issues like Chinese writer Yan Geling or sexuality like Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay from India, or giving us intercultural crime novels like Finland’s Kati Hiekkapelto. Despite their relative rarity in English, translated women offer a wealth of diversity.

So why not join in August’s Women in Translation Month? Simply pick up a book and enjoy it – or you could go a step further and write a review on Amazon or Goodreads, keep an eye out for literary events, hold a WiT-themed reading group, invite friends to present their favourite foreign females at a party, learn a new language and travel the world in search of an undiscovered woman writer to translate, set up a publishing house… the sky’s the limit.

 If you're in Berlin, you could head for ocelot on Brunnenstraße. They've put together a fine selection of books written by women and translated into English – and German! Pop by and support your local bookshop and global women writers in one fell swoop. 

The picture at the top is part of an artwork by Heather Marie Scholl. If you are Heather Marie Scholl and you read this, thanks for the great work and I hope it's OK to use the picture totally out of context. If not, please let me know.
 

Women in Translation Month: A Useful List

August is Women in Translation Month! #WITMonth! I approached my local independent bookshop and asked if they might like to do a special table, and they said yes! Then they said could I send them a list of suggested titles and they'd see what they could get hold of...

So I asked on Facebook and rather a lot of books came together. Here's the list for your inspiration. I used a fairly random cut-off date of 2010 publication and I've only given the most basic information – title, author, publisher. It still took all day though, so please just find out any additional stuff you need of your own accord.

You could use it to find books you'd like to read or review, to help out your bookseller, to brainwash your friends, whatever. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Susan Bernofsky has kindly put the list in alphabetical order, and as Margie Joseph sang: Like the size of the fish that the man claimed broke his wrist, it's growing. A number of bookshops are joining in, not just Ocelot in Berlin but also Ink84 and Belgravia Books in London and a few more in the pipeline. Watch out for that hashtag!

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.

"Feminisms" at Fischer & Suhrkamp

It's amusing. I can see the point of being inclusive, and by no means do I want to say men cannot and should not be feminists. But when I look at how the shared discussion of "feminisms" is shaping up at Hundertvierzehn.de and Logbuch Suhrkamp, I can't help but crunching numbers. And so far there are more male voices in the conversation than female.

I can't say I'm surprised. If you scroll down past their fig leaf you'll notice that both publishers' blogs are stuffed full of men writing about men, or men writing about themselves, with occasional women writing about men and every now and then a woman (oddly, often American) writing about women. It's like they don't have any women in their catalogues – or are their female writers too busy?

I'm getting sick of feeling so cynical, which may explain why my blogging pace has slowed right down. Because I hate all this Eyoreish complaining I'm doing all the time. Right now I'm also translating the book I've wanted to work on for the past two years: Clemens Meyer's Im Stein, which will be published late next year by Fitcarraldo Editions. It's sucking me in and making everything else feel kind of insignificant. Yes, it's by a man.

Here's a piece by a man about publishing women, Alex Valente in The Norwich Radical on A Climate of Positive Thinking. I hope it helps me and others to think positive. Maybe all this talk of feminisms at Fischer and Suhrkamp will remind them to make their blogs a little more diverse as well.

Tanja Dückers on the Gender Gap in German Letters

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Tenfold Women's Whammy in Translation Prizes

Having spent the past year complaining that women don't win translation prizes – and I wasn't the only one – I am absolutely thrilled about the latest crop of awards announcements.

Let's start with the US PEN Translation Prizes for fiction and poetry, which went to Denise Newman (for her translation from Danish of Naja Marie Aidt's Babboon) and Eliza Griswold (for I Am the Beggar of the World, translated from Pashto). That makes two women translators and two books by women.

Moving on the America's Best Translated Book Award, we see that the fiction prize last night went to Can Xue's The Last Lover, translated from Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, and the poetry prize to Roció Cerón's Diorama, translated from Spanish by Anna Rosenwong. Bringing us up to four books by women, translated by four women.

Most superduperexcitingly, for me, is the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, awarded in my country of origin. And as you may know by now, at yesterday's swanky champagne reception it went to....

Jenny Erpenbeck and Susan Bernofsky for The End of Days. Here's my review from way back when. I'm very pleased indeed for Erpenbeck and Bernofsky and the world at large, because this is an excellent German novel, no doubt in an excellent translation, which deserves recognition and readers.

So we have ten women winning translation prizes. The only book I know of the five is Erpenbeck's, but I'm happy that all our angry foot-stomping has prompted judges on two continents to look a little more closely at fiction and poetry by women in translation. Or it could of course be coincidence that five outstanding books written and translated by women happen to have caught their eyes. I don't really care either way.

I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, translated from the Pashto - See more at: http://www.pen.org/literature/2015-pen-award-poetry-translation#sthash.NPmz2oC1.dpuf

I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, translated from the Pashto - See more at: http://www.pen.org/literature/2015-pen-award-poetry-translation#sthash.NPmz2oC1.dpuf

her translation from the Danish of Naja Marie Aidt's Baboon - See more at: http://www.pen.org/literature/2015-pen-translation-prize#sthash.jRIn4L4R.dpufger

her translation from the Danish of Naja Marie Aidt's Baboon - See more at: http://www.pen.org/literature/2015-pen-translation-prize#sthash.jRIn4L4R.dpuf

her translation from the Danish of Naja Marie Aidt's Baboon - See more at: http://www.pen.org/literature/2015-pen-translation-prize#sthash.jRIn4L4R.dpuf

her translation from the Danish of Naja Marie Aidt's Baboon - See more at: http://www.pen.org/literature/2015-pen-translation-prize#sthash.jRIn4L4R.dpuf

her translation from the Danish of Naja Marie Aidt's Baboon - See more at: http://www.pen.org/literature/2015-pen-translation-prize#sthash.jRIn4L4R.dpuf

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!

On Role Models

It's International Women's Day and I'm thinking about inspiring role models. Specifically, I'm thinking that the people I appreciate as role models have overcome certain hurdles to get where they are today. I think it's good to talk about our role models, spreading the love if you will, so that we realize that the straight path isn't the only one and women in particular can achieve great things via other routes.

I have some hurdles of my own. When I was a student of German Studies, merely being a woman was one of them. I was in a department (Birmingham University) with an all-male faculty, although the students were almost all women. Although my best friend and I got the best degrees in our year it was only men who continued their studies to MA level there – I think it simply didn't occur to us that we could have a career in academia, and none of our teachers suggested it to us. Actually that's not strictly true; I did happen to meet one then junior member of staff on the bus and he asked me if I'd be interested. I said no, I didn't like the academic atmosphere. Actually, what I said was (I remember it well), "I don't like the atmospheric academy – no, I mean academic atmosphere." I was a bit nervous.

It's OK, I know enough women in German Studies now to understand that it would have been tough for me, that career in academia, and wouldn't have given me the rich chain of experiences prompted by moving in to a one-room flat with coal heating in East Berlin with a trainee gardener rather than attending my graduation. But I'm glad that girls studying German nowadays are at least aware of the option, what with all the great women in the field to lead the way.

Now that I'm a literary translator, I can say that the things that have made it trickier for me are my slightly odd taste in books, my slightly odd sense of humour, being a single parent and thus really needing to earn decent money all the time and not being able to travel as much as some, not having attended the right kind of school or the right university and thus not knowing the right people, also because I'm in Berlin rather than London, and having a bit of a baby face when I do show it in public. None of them seem to be to do with being a woman – hooray!

So here are two of my role models, women who make me keep on plugging away. One of them will hardly surprise you: she's Anthea Bell. I love the way she raised two children on her own by translating, including children's books, and gave us her incredibly inventive Asterix translations and all sorts of other wonderful reading experiences, actively shaping my childhood without me realizing it for years. Here she is, very recently, on "Why Translation Matters". I'm thrilled that she's been gaining the recognition and honour she deserves, with prizes and an OBE and a big fat German medal and all-round appreciation. And she's still going strong. I suspect that if she hadn't divorced, we would never have heard of her – she'd have had no need to work so hard.

The other is a German translator, Karen Nölle. Karen has three children, including one set of twins (of course they're all grown up now) but she didn't let that stop her back in the bad old eighties in West Germany, when childcare was considered a sin and schools were out by noon because mummy was at home to make lunch. She moved out of academia to work as a translator from English to German and later edit too, and has been sharing her skills as a workshop leader for nearly twenty years. Indeed, that's how I know what a great translator she is, having benefitted from two awe-inspiring doses of her teaching. Karen is an active feminist, very supportive of other women in various roles, and enjoys translating books by women in particular, including Andrea Barrett, Doris Lessing, Alice Munro, Barbara Trapido and Janet Frame. In 2010 she co-founded the publishing house Edition Fünf, which re-releases books by women that have been unjustly forgotten. They make beautiful bright red editions, and I love what they say about their all-female list:

We don't think a writer's gender is a qualitative feature of good texts. What we're interested in, though, is lines of female tradition. We want to read what and how women write.

Isn't that a wonderful statement?

So on International Women's Day, why not spend a moment thinking of your role models and telling other people about how they inspired you? I note, having written all this, that the hashtag for the day is #MakeItHappen, which is tricky to fit in here but these are – hmm – two women who have indeed "made it happen" for themselves, their families, other translators and of course all their many readers. I have a feeling neither of them took the straight path but both of them are probably glad of it.

Droste Prize to Schalansky and Präauer

Today is obviously literary awards day out there in German literature-land. Number one is the Droste Prize of the Town of Meersburg. It's awarded every two years to outstanding women writers, and I'm embarrassed to admit I'd never noticed it existed until today.

According to the trade mag Börsenblatt, this year's main prize goes to Judith Schalansky, whose novel The Giraffe's Neck you can read in Shaun Whiteside's translation. The judges praised the versatile and radical nature of her work, which stretches between writing and graphic design, very nicely showcased in her Atlas of Remote Islands. Schalansky is also in charge of a very attractive mini-imprint for the indie publishers Matthes & Seitz, Naturkunden. She gets €6000 and a slap-up meal.

They also have a junior prize worth €4000, which this year goes to Teresa Präauer. Hooray! Sadly you can't get either of her books in English. Boo!

The award honours Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, obviously, a nineteenth-century poet whose work I have not read.

A Women's Prize for Translated Books

Since the panel asking "Where are the women in translation?" at this spring's London Book Fair, I have been thinking about how to raise awareness of women writers in translation. Significantly more books by men get translated into English than books by women, and at International Translation Day we held a session to start doing something about that. You can read chair Sophie Mayer's excellent briefing about it on the Free Word website.

There are lots of things we can do. We can review books written by women to help redress the imbalance in review coverage; reviewing books by women in translation will also, ideally, improve translator visibility. We can address funding issues so that translation grants are more evenly distributed, and a working group was formed to do just that. We can look at best practice and acknowledge those publishers who are doing it right. We can address gatekeepers – many of whom, as another working group established, are women: teachers, booksellers, translators, readers, editors. There are already grassroots initiatives promoting writing by women on Twitter, for instance.

What I wanted to do was to establish a prize for women's books in translation. I'm pleased to say that the idea was popular and we formed a working group at the end of the session to try and make it a reality. So let me outline my idea in more detail here and share some of what we talked about on Friday.

I'll start with what Sophie Mayer points out in her briefing notes:

Since its inaugural award in 1996, the Orange Award (now the Bailey’s Women’s Prize) has shown an unerring ability to celebrate and promote emerging writers who are now fixtures in the literary heavens. According to The Bookseller, the Orange Prize is a  proven driver of sales, and libraries that promote the prize reported a reader survey in which 48% of respondents said that they had tried new writers as a result of the promotion, and 42% said that they would try other books by the new authors they had read.

Yet, from its inception, the Award has been controversial, losing its first sponsor (Mitsubishi) and courting criticism from its own judges as well as reviewers and authors. AS Byatt called it ‘sexist… The Orange prize assumes there is a feminine subject matter – which I don't believe in’, although the award does not stipulate gendered subject matter, and has rewarded historical epics, crime thrillers and experimental writing, genres often associated with male writers.

With awards to Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (and to Diane Evans and Irene Sabatini in the short-lived Orange Award for New Writers), Orange juries have also been more attentive to the multiethnic and transnational diversity of Anglophone writing than more established UK literary prizes.  That raises the intriguing possibility of replacing the Orange New Writers award with a Bailey’s Writing in Translation award that continues to extend the prize’s global awareness.

What I am interested in setting up is not a translation prize especially for women writers (or indeed translators); it would not be a sub-category of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, which should continue to be awarded to the translated book judged to be the best of the year. The IFFP has never yet been awarded to a woman, almost certainly reflecting the imbalance in submissions. In my view, however, it must continue to consider quality above all other criteria while ensuring that the judges are a balanced mix.

What I want is a women's prize for translated fiction; a little sister to the Bailey's Prize, for instance. It would raise awareness for great women's writing from the non-Anglophone world rather than for great non-Anglophone writing by women. I know that's a subtle distinction but I think it's an important one.

The Bailey's Prize prompts debate every year through its mere existence, and every year people point out that women are still at a disadvantage in publishing. A women's prize for translated books would use exactly the same arguments – except that the translation stage actually amplifies this disadvantage, meaning that significantly fewer books by women are available in translation than books by men. In 2013, about 25-35% of new translated fiction published in the USA (the only figures we have) was written by women.

A women's prize for translated books would highlight those books that do make it through. It would give booksellers, journalists, reviewers, bloggers, tweeters and interested readers a hook and get them arguing and help them to discover diverse writing by women. It would celebrate the work of women writers and their translators. It would reward those publishers who do bring out books by women in translation. I suspect it would even be possible, at this point, to publish a preliminary list of all the books written by women published in translation in the UK in a particular year, before drawing up a longlist and a shortlist. Almost everyone loves a list these days, and book prizes are a useful way of exploiting that mental laziness we all share.

So it's a fairly simple idea because we have a precedent. Now all we have to do is put it into practice. We can do it. And the awards ceremony will be amazing.

And the 2014 Indie Hotlist Longlist

Alongside the German Book Prize there's also the independent publishers' Hotlist, which is perhaps slightly more transparent. As in: they show you all the submissions (143 of them - one per publisher) and then they choose thirty of those, and then you can vote on your favourite. The three books/publishers with the most votes get a spot on the final hotlist, along with seven books/publishers selected by a jury. And then that jury announces the actual winner at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. At a party that anyone can go to, not like the German Book Prize announcement (although to be fair, that one is broadcast on the radio).

Voting's open until 18 August, so you can still join in if you like. To be honest, though, how can anyone possibly decide between thirty books they've never read? Seeing as the €5000 prize goes to the publisher rather than the writer/translator anyway, I've just picked my favourite publisher out of the thirty in the running. Because, hey, everyone else is voting on equally dubious premises, I assume.

The hotlist will be announced at the beginning of September, at which point I'll report back.

I've been thinking, arguing, trying to form an opinion, by the way, about women on prize lists and women on prize juries. Because a lot of people said yesterday, Jeez, the German Book Prize longlist only has five women on it! And I think, yes, OK, that's a pretty crummy percentage. In fact, clever translator and writer Clemens J. Setz worked out that over the past ten years (?) of the prize's existence, women have occupied 5.77 out of the 20 longlist spots on average. On the other hand, women have won the prize itself more often than men. What we don't know, however, as clever translator and writer Isabel F. Cole pointed out, is the gender ratio of the writers whose books were submitted by their publishers, 176 of them. So we don't know whether the jury had fewer books by women to choose from or just happened to prefer the ones written by men.

Part of the reaction, if you ask me, comes from critics needing to find a hook for their speedily written news items and being convinced they could do better than the respective jury. But whatever the case, the German Book Prize is doing one thing really well: its seven-person jury is made up of four women and three men and is chaired by a woman*. That, for me, is where quotas make sense – for individuals, not for works of art. Because I think what I ultimately think is that in this kind of competition – which will only ever be subjective, of course, because how could there ever be a "best book of the year"? – it has to be the quality of the novels that counts, not the identity of the people who wrote them.

*The Hotlist has five men and two women, but hey, we don't know how that happened either.

I Found Inspiration at the London Book Fair

It's counterintuitive, the title of this post. Book fairs are places where publishers go to monetize things. And London is a place where money goes to multiply itself. But at the risk of sounding twee - although I don't care much if I do - I found there were people and projects on the margins that inspired me.

I'd been doing a short publishing-related job that made me unhappy, for various reasons, and I was feeling cynical about the book world, not least because no publisher has had the guts to go for either of the two books I love most in the world right now. And there were moments, I have to admit, that made me despair, like when an Anglophone publisher raved about a German book I think is ridiculous or another publisher was a wet blanket about a German book I really admire, or rights sellers with fabulous books on their lists were exhausted by editors fending them off. Or there was the overheard snippet of a panel when the Daily Mail books editor said something along the lines of "our readers love anything to do with World War II". Or the fact that you couldn't swing a cat without hitting apparently nice people who just happen to work for Amazon. Or all those people who blanked me.

So under normal circumstances, I would probably fly back from the London book fair deeply mired in gloom. But actually I was in the kind of affectionate and forgiving mood that prompted me to be especially kind to the woman on her first ever shift at the airport food outlet, who took ten minutes to scan my bottle of Coke. Shall I get round to telling you why that was?

It was because of the Literary Translation Centre. I think it was bigger this year, although there were no free sandwiches but that's OK. It was a wonderful place to bump into friends and colleagues and gossip and talk shop. And it also had a programme of events that was remarkably well put-together. The panels were cleverly composed of people from across the various spectrums - spectra? - so from commercial publishers to shoestring enterprises, from super-experienced translators to just-starting-outers, from newspaper literary editors to feminist poets. There were four events that have left a lasting impression. The first was the first panel of the fair, Meet the Publishers, which feels like a long time ago now but made me think, hey, there are publishers and editors who really want to do translations and are as passionate about this stuff as the rest of us are. Isn't that great? Then there was one about co-translating books, which suddenly made a whole lot of sense to me. Then there was one about translators as agents, which sent out mixed messages. In a nutshell, we learned that editors in houses with even the slightest whiff of commercialism to them will probably not take a translator's advice on fantastic and amazing books they ought to buy, which rather confirms my depressing experiences. On the other hand, people in the more experimental enterprises would prefer recommendations from translators to recommendations from foreign publishers. And if you're good friends with a publisher that helps too. I am not, although I did have a rather dangerous close encounter on the escalators up and down from the International Rights Centre, but that story has been told with much hyperbole elsewhere.

But the number-one inspiring hour at the London Book Fair was Where Are the Women in Translation?  As the chair Sophie Mayer commented, they were pretty much assembled in the Literary Translation Centre at that very moment. The space was packed to the gills with interested women. There is, of course, no shortage of female translators, but as Alison Anderson pointed out last year in Words Without Borders, the Anglophone world falls short when it comes to publishing translated books by women. Anderson was on the panel along with the writer Krys Lee and Jane Bradley of For Books' Sake (would it be lowering the tone here to note that she and Rosie Goldsmith share this year's prize for best book fair outfit?). So there was some talk about what the problem is and what causes it, and some about what we can do about it. What I got out of it was: if women – despite writing more titles, selling more copies and reading more books – get less review coverage and award glory all around the world, then it is up to us to do several things.

Firstly, we can pitch books by women to publishers, who may be less aware of them because of the above problem (although if I put my cynical hat back on for a moment, it's probably not worth doing so with commercial publishing houses). Secondly, we can draw attention to the books by women that do get translated, and I shall try to bear that in mind here. And thirdly, we can praise publishers who are doing it right, like Peirene and Other Press. Well done! (By "we" I mean anyone who cares about the issue, really, and despite the gender breakdown of the event's audience I don't think that's only women.)

What I would like to see is a literary award especially for women in translation. I don't know how to make that happen - and I'm aware that it potentially falls into the tabloids' "black lesbian in a wheelchair" category - but I think if such a thing did exist, it would be good for all of us. It could be coupled with a best practice prize for publishers who showcase diversity, or something along those lines.    

In the meantime, I'm infused with enthusiasm by all the people tweeting on #readwomen2014 and #womenintranslation. And everyone was excited to learn that the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, never won by a woman ever, has a fifty-fifty shortlist.

Here's the thing: commercial publishing is not the kind of place I really want to hang out, but its existence provides the centre to my periphery, if you see what I mean. If there was no London Book Fair there would be no Literary Translation Centre, and if there were no misery memoirs or whatever is selling like hotcakes right now, it would be harder for us to get our hands on Inka Parei's books, for example (assuming we continue to live in a capitalist world). And the margins are the places where the people gather who are motivated by passion and excellence, and those are the people and the projects that inspire me. Thank you.   

Love German Books' Top 10 Berlinerinnen

Top gent Rory MacLean has a top 10 of Berliners in literature at the Guardian. Hooray! So I'm jumping on the bandwagon and steering it headlong into the Year of Reading Women to give you my very own top 10 of Berlin women in books. You might notice that I've actually translated a couple of these books myself. That's partly down to shameless self-promotion and partly because, as a woman in Berlin, I love books about women in Berlin. I refuse to apologize. These women, it turns out, are tough survivors, mothers and daughters, and girls who wanna have fun.

1. Inge Deutschkron in her autobiography Outcast (trans. Jean Steinberg)
Subtitled "A Jewish Girl in Wartime Berlin", the book tells the story of how Inge and her mother survived the Nazis thanks to kind friends and strangers and their own quick wits. 

2. Gina Regina in Ulrike Draesner's story of the same name, in Berlin Tales (ed. Lyn Marven)
Gina has turned her talent into a job, and her talent is seduction – but her job's not what you might think it is.

3. Pola Negri in Daniela Droscher's novel Pola (not translated)
A fictionalized real movie star who fell down on her luck and went back to Nazi Germany from Hollywood. She constantly has her foot in her mouth and is constantly on the lookout for luxury and adventure.

4. Irina in Eugen Ruge's In Times of Fading Light (trans. Anthea Bell)
A fabulous mother character originally from Russia, who can't quite cope with the end of the GDR but manages the rest of her life swimmingly, just about.

5. Mifti in Helene Hegemann's Axolotl Roadkill (trans. Katy Derbyshire)
Mifti is totally fucked up by her dead mother and her life in Berlin. Teenage techno rampages in a precocious voice, but at least she doesn't take heroin. Much.

6. Hell in Inka Parei's The Shadow-Boxing Woman (trans. Katy Derbyshire)
Hell can do martial arts and she can find missing fathers, but finding her neighbour and coming to terms with a traumatic experience are more difficult.

7. Doris in Irmgard Keun's The Artificial Silk Girl (trans. Kathie von Ankum)
Roll over Sally Bowles, here comes Doris. Teetering around 1920s Berlin on the brink of all that, only with a voice of her own to die for.

8. Sugar, Cakes and Candy in Annett Gröschner's Walpurgistag (not translated)
Three outrageous Muslim girls who don't take life or themselves too seriously. And the ending when they run into the three old ladies? Your hearts will melt.

9. Helene in Julia Franck's The Blind Side of the Heart (trans. Anthea Bell)
She deals with one of Franck's obligatory crazy mothers, runs away to live with a louche cousin in Berlin, and ends up a faux-Aryan crazy mother herself, married to a Nazi. And then Helene takes a big decision most women would regret.

10. Flora in Terézia Mora's Das Ungeheuer (not translated)
Flora commits suicide before the novel starts, and her life was not a piece of cake. But her notes show us a sensitive and intelligent woman who kept her problems to herself.

Who are your favourite Berlinerinnen?