Íntimas (Adela Zamudio, 1854–1928) is an epistolary novel set in and around Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 1906–07.

Juan is a Bolivian poet at the turn of the century, visiting the city of Cochabamba and writing letters to his friend Armando about the masked sensuality and hostility he feels seething beneath the placid face of this insular mining town. Antonia is a married woman living in Cochabamba, writing to her friend Gracia about the local gossip—which soon erupts into a scandal that threatens to destroy a family. Contrasting Juan’s letters home with Antonia’s private correspondence to her friend, Confidences tells a story of tragic love and explosive passions, showing how the intimacies that begin behind closed doors spill out into the public sphere.

The only novel written by acclaimed feminist poet Adela Zamudio, Confidences was harshly criticized for not following the conventions of realist literature, but it has since been hailed as a lost classic of Bolivian modernism. Now available in English for the first time, this translation captures the lyrical qualities of Zamudio’s prose as it vividly depicts how sexism, religious dogma, and prejudice prevented women from shaping their own destinies.

To order: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/bucknell/confidences/9781684486069

“This first English translation of Íntimas (Confidences) constitutes an important event in Latin American literary and gender studies.” - Javier Sanjinés C., author of Mestizaje Upside-Down: Aesthetic Politics in Modern Bolivia

“A gripping story of love, scandal, and family feuds set in 1907 Cochabamba, Bolivia. Though written over a century ago, Adela Zamudio’s feminism is plain for all to see. Laura Nagle’s excellent translation has at last made this pioneering novel available to English readers.” - Catherine Davies, coeditor of Transnational Spanish Studies

Laura Nagle translates prose and poetry from French, Spanish, and Irish. Her work includes the first complete English translation of Prosper Mérimée’s 1827 hoax, Songs for the Gusle, and her translations of contemporary short fiction have appeared in The Southern Review, Southword, and Latin American Literature Today. She resides in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Adela Zamudio (1854–1928) composed poetry in Spanish and Quechua and published numerous short stories and articles, often using the pen name Soledad. She is remembered today as a pioneer in the Bolivian feminist movement, a fierce advocate for girls’ education, and one of her country’s finest poets.

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In Wilhelmsburg, Hamburg’s so-called ‘problem area’, an American couple is found brutally murdered in a derelict house.

Prosecutor Chastity Riley is assigned the case and quickly finds herself waist-deep in a murky tangle of city planners, shady investors and vanishing officials. The gentrification machine is rolling on, and someone is sending a very clear message.

As November fog settles over the city, Chastity is coughing up blood, her personal life is a slow-motion disaster, and her former colleague Faller won’t stop interfering. But nothing is going to stop her from cutting through the lies, not even the sharks circling ever closer.

Dark, caustic and piercing, Sharks is a searing investigation into greed, power and the price of resistance in a city devouring itself, from one of Germany’s finest, most original crime writers.

Buy the book: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/2161/9781917764087

‘Richly entertaining, wickedly cutting, to the point and funny. The perfect example of a crime novel that is literally pacy and has something to say, because you know Buchholz cares about society and Hamburg, and it shows in her writing’ Paul Burke, CrimeTime

‘A dark treat … memorable modern noir, and a fascinating portrait of seedy life in Hamburg’ Telegraph

‘Simone Buchholz can make you grin, gasp or gag at will’ The Times

‘Beautifully concise, with commendably sparse prose, dark humour and an appealing protagonist … uncompromising, provocative and righteously fierce’ Guardian

‘Beautifully written in cool, witty prose’ N.J. Cooper, Literary Review

‘German-American Chastity Riley is snooty, churlish, sarcastic, sometimes drunk and always inappropriate. The whole series breaks the boundaries of typical crime novels’ Romy Hausmann

‘A distinctive voice, and a flawed but compelling protagonist … style and sass and St Pauli’ Will Carver

‘Ice-cool, effortlessly classy prose’ Observer

‘Reading Buchholz is like walking on firecrackers’ Graeme Macrae Burnet

‘Buchholz’s work remains as persuasive as ever’ Financial Times

‘Simone Buchholz writes with real authority and a pungent, noir-ish sense of time and space … a palpable hit’Independent

‘With brief, pacy chapters and fizzling dialogue, this almost feels like American procedural noir and not a translation’ Maxim Jakubowski

‘There is a fantastic pace to the story … a unique voice that delivers a stylish story’NB Magazine

‘A real blast of adrenaline’ Big Issue

Rachel Ward, MA, FITI, lives in Wymondham, near Norwich, UK, and has been working as a freelance literary and creative translator from German and French to English since gaining her MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia in 2002. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, and a member of the Society of Authors’ Translators Association. She specialises in translation for children and young adults, as well as in crime fiction and other contemporary literature. Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz (Orenda Books), in her translation, won the 2022 CWA Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger award, and she was shortlisted for the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 2023 for Tasting Sunlight and again in 2025 for One Grand Summer. Her non-fiction interests include history, politics, art, journalism and travel.

Simone Buchholz was born in Hanau in 1972. At university, she studied Philosophy and Literature, worked as a waitress and a columnist, and trained to be a journalist at the prestigious Henri-Nannen-School in Hamburg. In 2016, Simone Buchholz was awarded the Crime Cologne Award as well as runner-up in the German Crime Fiction Prize for Blue Night, which was number one on the Krimi ZEIT Best of Crime List for months. The critically acclaimed Beton Rouge, Mexico Street, Hotel Cartagena and River Clyde all followed in the Chastity Riley series. Hotel Cartagena won the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger in 2022. The Acapulco (2023) marked the beginning of the Chastity Reloaded series, with The Kitchen out in 2024. She lives in Sankt Pauli, in the heart of Hamburg, with her husband and son.

Looking to take a vacation before settling in for to his PhD studies and hoping to swindle a little traveling money from his father, Chen Munian made up a story about killing someone and needing to flee. But now that lie has taken on a life of its own and everyone—the university, the police, the sprawling campus community—is convinced he’s a murderer. Munian is barely holding on: his wages are meager, he lives with a group of chaotic roommates, he drinks too much with his crazy artist neighbor who is obsessed with Van Gogh, and his bumbling attempts to woo the beautiful Qin Ke always end in heartache. His life keeps spiraling out of his control, and he can’t help but wonder if he was destined to be a murderer all along. Xu Zechen’s Night Train, in Jeremy Tiang’s brash translation, follows characters who live on the precipice, where the foolish mistakes of young men can have devastating consequences.

“[Xu Zechen’s] silent toiling has given voice to the equally silent social classes struggling on the boundaries of the country’s urban landscape.” —China Daily

Translator bio
Jeremy Tiang is a novelist, playwright and literary translator. He has translated over thirty books from across the Chinese-speaking world, including novels by Yan Ge, Zhang Yueran, Yeng Pway Ngon and Huang Chong-Kai. Jeremy won the Obie Award for Outstanding New Play for Salesman之死 and the Singapore Literature Prize for his novel State of Emergency. He is the co-editor with Dr Kavita Bhanot of Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation. Originally from Singapore, he now lives in New York City.

Author bio
Xu Zechen is the author of the novels Midnight’s Door, Night Train, Heaven on Earth, Beijing Sprawl (Two Lines Press, 2023) and Running Through Beijing (Two Lines Press, 2014). He was selected by People’s Literature as one of the “Future 20” best Chinese writers under forty-one. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, he lives in Beijing.

BUY THE BOOK: https://www.twolinespress.com/shop/books/night-train

From her childhood in Romania, in a village ‘as small as a thimble on the edge of the world’, through to life in exile in Germany, Herta Müller’s story unspools against the tumultuous history of Romania in the latter half of the twentieth century. Here, the Nobel Prize laureate reflects on cultural history, memory and trauma, and on what it was to live and write during Ceausescu’s regime: on the friendships that buckled under the weight of fear and paranoia; on the experience of being surveilled and interrogated; and on the unique blend of fear and tedium borne through life under totalitarianism.

The Village on the Edge of the World is a book that chronicles the minutiae of life under both fascism and the Soviet Union, while charting the existential questions posed by these regimes of the twentieth century – and how they remain with us in the twenty-first.

To order: https://granta.com/products/the-village-on-the-edge-of-the-world/

"A vivid reflection on life and literature" (FT)

"A profound delight. In this seemingly casual tour inside the mind of one of the century's great writers there are frequent, electrifying moments of immense insight - each one feels like a trapdoor opening into a reality you realise you were, till now, just skimming the surface of. Müller's thinking is glorious to share in, and her thoughts have never been more relevant." (Anna Funder)

Kate McNaughton is a writer and translator of French, German and Italian into English. She was born and raised in Paris by British parents, and now lives in Berlin. Her debut novel, How I Lose You, was published in 2018.

Herta Müller was born on 17 August 1953 in Banat, Romania. In 1987, she emigrated to Germany and has lived in Berlin ever since. She is the author of The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, The Hunger Angel and The Fox Was Ever the Hunter, among other works. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

NOW WE ARE SIX! We can't believe we've been going for six years. Thank you so much all for your support and creativity, and here's to many more years of celebrating literature in translation.
Charlie & Tina x

And big thanks for Frank Wynne for making this video for us!

#translatorsaloud #translation #literature #books #readings #translationreading #reading #translators

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In 1966 Suriname, the Vanta family, an intricate blend of Creole, Maroon, French, Indian, Indigenous, British, and Jewish heritage, is led by Grandma Bee, a proud, cigar-smoking matriarch facing her final days. As she reflects on her scattered family and the loss of her favourite granddaughter, Heli, exiled to the Netherlands for an affair with her white teacher, Bee grapples with one question: What truly binds a family? Off-White offers a moving exploration of Bee’s legacy amid themes of male violence, colonialism, and the dismantling of racial identity, marking the return of a celebrated Surinamese author after two decades.

OFF-WHITE is co-translated by David McKay and Lucy Scott.

‘Off-White…echoes [Roemer’s] earlier themes—the racial and sexual dynamics of Suriname’s multiethnic society—but with a larger scope, examining several generations of a Surinamese family in the years between World War II and the 1960s.’ —Anderson Tepper, The New York Times

‘Emotionally cool; the narrative ripples with the feeling of history and ill-advised decisions slowly insinuating themselves into lives rather than dramatically transforming them.’ —Kirkus Reviews

BUY THE BOOK:
https://www.tiltedaxispress.com/offwhite
https://www.twolinespress.com/shop/books/off-white

Translator bios
Lucy Scott is a translator of Caribbean literature written in Dutch and French. Her short story and essay translations thus far have appeared in Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee Review and in Wilderness House Literary Review. She is the translator of Astrid Roemer’s On a Woman’s Madness, shortlisted for the National Book Award and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Her recent work also includes Self Portrait by Ludwig Volbeda.

David McKay, a literary translator based in The Hague area, is best known for translating Stefan Hertmans's novels, including The Ascent. He won the Vondel Prize for Hertmans’s War and Turpentine. Other recent publications include The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje, which has been shortlisted the National Book Award, the PEN Translation Prize, and the Republic of Consciousness Prize and longlisted for the International Booker Prize.

Author bio
In 1966, at the age of nineteen, Astrid Roemer emigrated from Suriname to the Netherlands. She identified herself as a cosmopolitan writer. Exploring themes of race, gender, family and identity, her poetic, unconventional prose stands in the tradition of authors such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. She was awarded the P.C. Hooft Prize in 2016, and the three-yearly Dutch Literature Prize (Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren) in 2021. In 2026, Astrid Roemer passed away at the age of 78.

Íntimas (Adela Zamudio, 1854–1928) is an epistolary novel set in and around Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 1906–07.

Juan is a Bolivian poet at the turn of the century, visiting the city of Cochabamba and writing letters to his friend Armando about the masked sensuality and hostility he feels seething beneath the placid face of this insular mining town. Antonia is a married woman living in Cochabamba, writing to her friend Gracia about the local gossip—which soon erupts into a scandal that threatens to destroy a family. Contrasting Juan’s letters home with Antonia’s private correspondence to her friend, Confidences tells a story of tragic love and explosive passions, showing how the intimacies that begin behind closed doors spill out into the public sphere.

The only novel written by acclaimed feminist poet Adela Zamudio, Confidences was harshly criticized for not following the conventions of realist literature, but it has since been hailed as a lost classic of Bolivian modernism. Now available in English for the first time, this translation captures the lyrical qualities of Zamudio’s prose as it vividly depicts how sexism, religious dogma, and prejudice prevented women from shaping their own destinies.

To order: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/bucknell/confidences/9781684486069

“This first English translation of Íntimas (Confidences) constitutes an important event in Latin American literary and gender studies.” - Javier Sanjinés C., author of Mestizaje Upside-Down: Aesthetic Politics in Modern Bolivia

“A gripping story of love, scandal, and family feuds set in 1907 Cochabamba, Bolivia. Though written over a century ago, Adela Zamudio’s feminism is plain for all to see. Laura Nagle’s excellent translation has at last made this pioneering novel available to English readers.” - Catherine Davies, coeditor of Transnational Spanish Studies

Laura Nagle translates prose and poetry from French, Spanish, and Irish. Her work includes the first complete English translation of Prosper Mérimée’s 1827 hoax, Songs for the Gusle, and her translations of contemporary short fiction have appeared in The Southern Review, Southword, and Latin American Literature Today. She resides in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Adela Zamudio (1854–1928) composed poetry in Spanish and Quechua and published numerous short stories and articles, often using the pen name Soledad. She is remembered today as a pioneer in the Bolivian feminist movement, a fierce advocate for girls’ education, and one of her country’s finest poets.

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In Wilhelmsburg, Hamburg’s so-called ‘problem area’, an American couple is found brutally murdered in a derelict house.

Prosecutor Chastity Riley is assigned the case and quickly finds herself waist-deep in a murky tangle of city planners, shady investors and vanishing officials. The gentrification machine is rolling on, and someone is sending a very clear message.

As November fog settles over the city, Chastity is coughing up blood, her personal life is a slow-motion disaster, and her former colleague Faller won’t stop interfering. But nothing is going to stop her from cutting through the lies, not even the sharks circling ever closer.

Dark, caustic and piercing, Sharks is a searing investigation into greed, power and the price of resistance in a city devouring itself, from one of Germany’s finest, most original crime writers.

Buy the book: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/2161/9781917764087

‘Richly entertaining, wickedly cutting, to the point and funny. The perfect example of a crime novel that is literally pacy and has something to say, because you know Buchholz cares about society and Hamburg, and it shows in her writing’ Paul Burke, CrimeTime

‘A dark treat … memorable modern noir, and a fascinating portrait of seedy life in Hamburg’ Telegraph

‘Simone Buchholz can make you grin, gasp or gag at will’ The Times

‘Beautifully concise, with commendably sparse prose, dark humour and an appealing protagonist … uncompromising, provocative and righteously fierce’ Guardian

‘Beautifully written in cool, witty prose’ N.J. Cooper, Literary Review

‘German-American Chastity Riley is snooty, churlish, sarcastic, sometimes drunk and always inappropriate. The whole series breaks the boundaries of typical crime novels’ Romy Hausmann

‘A distinctive voice, and a flawed but compelling protagonist … style and sass and St Pauli’ Will Carver

‘Ice-cool, effortlessly classy prose’ Observer

‘Reading Buchholz is like walking on firecrackers’ Graeme Macrae Burnet

‘Buchholz’s work remains as persuasive as ever’ Financial Times

‘Simone Buchholz writes with real authority and a pungent, noir-ish sense of time and space … a palpable hit’Independent

‘With brief, pacy chapters and fizzling dialogue, this almost feels like American procedural noir and not a translation’ Maxim Jakubowski

‘There is a fantastic pace to the story … a unique voice that delivers a stylish story’NB Magazine

‘A real blast of adrenaline’ Big Issue

Rachel Ward, MA, FITI, lives in Wymondham, near Norwich, UK, and has been working as a freelance literary and creative translator from German and French to English since gaining her MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia in 2002. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, and a member of the Society of Authors’ Translators Association. She specialises in translation for children and young adults, as well as in crime fiction and other contemporary literature. Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz (Orenda Books), in her translation, won the 2022 CWA Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger award, and she was shortlisted for the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 2023 for Tasting Sunlight and again in 2025 for One Grand Summer. Her non-fiction interests include history, politics, art, journalism and travel.

Simone Buchholz was born in Hanau in 1972. At university, she studied Philosophy and Literature, worked as a waitress and a columnist, and trained to be a journalist at the prestigious Henri-Nannen-School in Hamburg. In 2016, Simone Buchholz was awarded the Crime Cologne Award as well as runner-up in the German Crime Fiction Prize for Blue Night, which was number one on the Krimi ZEIT Best of Crime List for months. The critically acclaimed Beton Rouge, Mexico Street, Hotel Cartagena and River Clyde all followed in the Chastity Riley series. Hotel Cartagena won the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger in 2022. The Acapulco (2023) marked the beginning of the Chastity Reloaded series, with The Kitchen out in 2024. She lives in Sankt Pauli, in the heart of Hamburg, with her husband and son.

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Distant Signs: A Novel
by Anne Richter, translated by Douglas Irving, published in 2019 by Neem Tree Press.

Distant Signs is an intimate portrait of two families spanning three generations amidst turbulent political change, behind and beyond the Berlin Wall.

In 1960s East Germany, Margret, a professor’s daughter from the city, meets and marries Hans, from a small village in the Thuringian forest. The couple struggle to contend with their different backgrounds, and the emotional scars they bear from childhood in the aftermath of war. As East German history gradually unravels, with collision of the personal and political, acutely observed vignettes quietly reveal their two families’ hidden truths.

“I don't know that I've read a more moving piece of post-war German fiction - and this includes Günther Grass's best efforts.”

Misha, US Online Blog Tour Reviewer

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From the publisher (World Literature Today): “In this story of lengthy quarantine due to an unnamed virus, a woman sneaks into the mountain to collect ferns—many ferns. Simultaneously evoking life under past Chilean political oppression and living under recent worldwide quarantines due to Covid-19, this Cortazarian story marks the author’s English-language debut.”
Catalina Infante Beovic is a Chilean writer, publisher, journalist, and teacher. Follow Catalina on Instagram at @catalinainfantebeovic
Michelle Mirabella is a Spanish to English translator studying at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey. Follow Michelle on Instagram at @mirabella_michelle and Twitter at @MirabellaM_

Find the story at:
English translation, published by World Literature Today in 2020: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/fiction/ferns-catalina-infante-beovic
Spanish, published by Neón Ediciones: https://www.librospatagonia.com/library/publication/helechos

Follow World Literature Today on Twitter at @worldlittoday.

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It’s 2007 and we are in Bilbao, worn out by the final blows of Basque terrorism. Gorane and Jokin are twenty-five year old twins and children of ETA militants. Raised without rules, they take opposing and complementary directions: compliant and passive to everything, Jokin, a heroin-addict drummer, seems to follow in his parents’ footsteps, while Gorane, ambiguous and introverted, pulls away seeking refuge in an abstract world. When Jokin runs away and their parents become involved in a tragic event, Gorane finds herself prey to strange hallucinations of her parents. Meanwhile in Paris, Jokin struggles with his attraction to the mysterious Germana, yet, despite the distance, the twins’ lives seem destined to never separate and it will be a French writer’s novel that reconnects them.

The Melee is a polyphonic work; a world that connects reality to our most recondite dreams, a world where the only driving force seems to be blind violence. Can freedom reveal itself to be an instrument of torture, and can empathy that resists absolutism prevail in the face of trauma? Valentina Maini responds in the pages of this provocative debut and its web of stories connecting drug dealers, smugglers, psychiatrists, writers, cleaners and fortune tellers - and she does it with the conviction of Roberto Bolaño and Mathias Énard: looking chaos directly in the eye.

THE MELEE BY VALENTINA MAINI (PUBLISHED IN ITALIAN BY BOLLATI BORINGHIERI, 2020)

FIRST PLACE IN THE L'INDISCRETO QUALITY RANKINGS

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SEVERINO CESARI DEBUT AWARD 2020

SHORTLISTED FOR THE FONDAZIONE MONDADORI DEBUT AWARD 2020

CHOSEN BY KOBO IN THEIR 50 BOOKS TO DEFY AND SURVIVE THE YEAR 2020

“What is great European literature today? The Melee by Valentina Maini has the range and complexity to fit the bill and the ambition to be part of it.”
VERONICA RAIMO (The Girl at the Door)

“There are writers who, more than make their debut, burst onto the scene. By writing novels that play havoc with all the rules. Valentina Maini is one of them.”
ANDREA BAJANI (If You Kept a Record of Sins; Every Promise)

“Redolent of Clarice Lispector and Roberto Bolano, a haunted, captivating, poetic novel that tells the story of two children of ETA and their quest for life and the future under the tight rein of a true artist and her unique, visionary freedom of language.”
MARTA BARONE (Città sommersa)

“In The Melee, Valentina Maini unfurls a notable variety of textual typologies – reports, statements, recordings, a novel within the novel – showing that it is still possible to tell stories in an impressive, original manner.”
WU MING 2 (Q; Manituana; 54)


Valentina Maini was born in Bologna in 1987. She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature between Bologna and Paris and has published short stories in retabloid, TerraNullius, Atti Impuri, Horizonte, and other magazines. Some of her articles have appeared in Poetiche, La Deleuziana, and Classiques Garnier. With her collection of poetry, Casa Rotta (2016), she won the Anna Osti literary prize. She translates from French and from English into Italian.

Sean McDonagh is an emerging literary translator who translates from Italian. He is based in London where he works in publishing, and has been pursuing literary translation projects since participating in the Warwick Translates Summer School 2019. He has had a translation published on Asymptote, and as a poet has also had work published on Allegro, Rockland and Foxtrot Uniform. Sean has a BA in English, has lived and studied in Turin, and has completed an advanced course at the Italian Cultural Institute.

@seanpjamcdonagh (Twitter)
seanmcdonaghtranslator.com

For rights info, contact: Flavia Abbinante - flavia.abbinante@bollatiboringhieri.it
Rights Sold: Portuguese

The translator has obtained permission from the original rights holder to translate this sample and share a recording of it on Translators Aloud.
TO READ A LONGER EXTRACT, please visit: seanmcdonaghtranslator.com/projects-seeking-a-publisher

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