Translated Fiction and the Changing Shape of World Literary Circulation

Abstract

British readers bought 2.9 million works of translated fiction in 2016 and 3.8 million in 2025, with market value rising from 23.2 million to 40.7 million pounds. Over the same decade the source languages changed: Swedish, French and Italian gave way to Japanese, French and Russian. This article reads that shift as evidence of a structural rearrangement in world literary circulation rather than a passing fashion. It examines three linked developments. The first is the reconstitution of the International Booker Prize in 2016 as an annual award splitting its purse equally between author and translator, a change that made translation visible as labour and produced winners from Korean, Hindi, Kannada and Mandarin Chinese within a decade. The second is the arrival of a young, unexpectedly male readership for translated fiction in Britain, which inverts long standing assumptions about who reads across languages. The third is machine translation, which a Society of Authors survey found had already cost more than a third of literary translators paid work by 2024. Reading these against Casanova, Damrosch and Apter, the article argues that the centre of gravity in world literature is moving without the critical vocabulary moving with it, and that translation studies now has to describe a marketplace it once mainly critiqued from outside.