At the London Book Fair last week, two panels in the Literary Translation Center explored the market for works from two regions: Spain, and the Balkans.

By Olivia Snaije, Contributing Editor

It is always a challenge to get translations into the English-language marketplace, and the London Book Fair is one portal to get there. Two panels at the Fair’s Literary Translation Center last week explored getting languages from two regions into English, and the difficulty of coming from a small yet complex territory: Spain, and the Balkans.

In one panel, José Manuel Anta, Managing Director of the Federación de Gremios de Editores de España (FGEE) (the Federation of Spanish Publishers’ Guilds) kicked off a talk on Spain’s translation rights trade with the U.K with a few key observations about the Spanish market. “Our petrol is our language,” he quipped, noting that some 600 million people worldwide speak Spanish. However, he observed, rights sales from Spain are flat, having failed to grow between 2009 and 2024.

For perspective, he turned to panelists Sofia di Capita, foreign rights manager at the Barcelona-based Antonia Kerrigan Literary Agency, and Francisco Javier Sanz Grajera, book and film rights director at Grupo Planeta.

Although Spanish content is present in pop culture, Di Capita agreed that there was “somewhat of a lag” in the publishing world. As rights sellers to English-language markets, “we like to think of ourselves as a bridge,” Di Capita said, “but there is often an Atlantic triangle. We need to access the U.S. market in order to access the U.K. market.”

Sanz Grajera said that, over the past ten years, Planeta—which holds a major share of the market in Spain and a significant presence in Latin America (along with Penguin Random House)—has been doing well in terms of the English-speaking market. But, he conceded, “we’d like to do better.” There are several challenges, including finding “the right angle” to make a sale. But there is an even more fundamental problem, he suggested: very few editors in the U.S. or the U.K. read Spanish.

Both di Capita and Sanz Grajera agreed that the “hook” for them was the increase in small, independent publishing houses in the U.K. looking to explore new voices and literature.

In his opening remarks, Anta highlighted that Spain is the only European country to have experienced consistent growth over the past decade. And in a positive development, he noted that the Spanish government is now giving translation subsidies for Spanish titles into other languages, like France’s Centre National du Livre (CNL), which facilitates the translation of French books around the world.

One audience member, meanwhile, regretted the disappearance of the website New Spanish Books, which hasn’t been active since 2023. But a representative from Spain Export and Investment (ICEX), which ran the site, said the program might be relaunched.

Meanwhile, if one is to go by the long and shortlists of the International Booker Prize, Spanish-language Latin American authors are clearly experiencing a boom, and many are represented by literary agencies in Spain and published by Spanish publishers. Doubtless, interest in literature from Chile will be sparked next year, when Chile will be the guest of honor at the 2027 Frankfurter Buchmesse.

The Balkans

Moving from southern Europe to southeastern Europe, the Bosnian-U.S. author Aleksandar Hemon and Macedonian author Rumena Bužarovska discussed the political and cultural contexts of their countries with Sandorf Passage cofounder and publisher Buzz Poole.

Sandorf Passage is based in the U.S. and partners with the Zagreb-based publisher Sandorf, focusing on work in translation, with an emphasis on books from the Balkans.

While authors from the Balkans have garnered international acclaim, Poole asked Hemon and Bužarovska if it took the war following the breakup of former Yugoslavia for the world to understand that the region wasn’t monolithic?

Already a writer in his hometown of Sarajevo, Hemon happened to be in the U.S. when the war in Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo began, in 1992. He said he quickly started writing directly in English, removing the challenge of translation, and becoming one of the best-known authors from the region with novels such as Nowhere Man and The Lazarus Project, and most recently The World and All That It Holds.

“It was bad luck or luck that I was there first,” he said. The breakup of Yugoslavia and the collapse of the Soviet Union created “a glut of literature,” he said, “but literature helped people understand the area better.”

Bužarovska was born nearly 20 years after Hemon and didn’t experience the civil war. Macedonia had been relatively calm anyway, she said, adding that, when you’re from a small country you need to be known for something.

“In that sense, we weren’t interesting,” she suggested.  “As a Macedonian writer I had no expectations.” But, she said, she was angry at society and liked to write, and with the success of her 2014 short story collection, My Husband, which ruthlessly dissects the lives of couples, she became tremendously popular, first in the Balkans.

“It took a while for someone to risk translating something from Macedonian,” Bužarovska recalled. But once they did, it led to translations in more than 15 languages.

Hemon said that the complexity of the political situation in Bosnia calls for more voices to explain this multiplicity. “I try to avoid representing the Balkans; I don’t want to represent any group,” he said. Bužarovska agreed, adding: “the more diverse voices that come from the Balkans, the better. We can’t get stuck in war literature.”

Also a literary translator from English to Macedonian, Bužarovska is currently co-translating into English her first novel, Tony, a study of masculinity and tradition set in Skopje. “You can only reach the universal by the local,” she said, paraphrasing Flannery O’Connor.