You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Translated titles have had a phenomenal year in the UK, with Yuval Noah Harari leading a new wave of translated narrative non-fiction. However, for the year to 29th September, it’s a fiction title that tops the chart, with Antonio Iturbe’s The Librarian of Auschwitz, translated from Spanish by Lilit Zekulin Thwaites, selling 154,087 copies. Similar to Heather Morris’ blockbuster The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Iturbe’s novel is a fictionalised version of real-life concentration camp librarian and Holocaust survivor Dita Kraus’ experiences. She ran a secret library in Auschwitz, where books were forbidden, from the age of 14. It won Iturbe Spain’s Fundación Troa Prize for literary quality.
However, The Librarian... is one of only three fiction titles in the top 10: non-fiction dominates, with Harari featuring four times in the top 20 overall. Sapiens, originally published in Hebrew in Harari’s native Israel, performed solidly when it was released in the UK in 2015, shifting just under 100,000 copies in paperback that year. But then 2016 rocked the world on its axis: Chris Evans’ BBC Radio 2 show interviewed Harari, and he became the only Israeli academic in history to get name-checked by ITV2’s “Love Island”. Sapiens has since become a mainstay of the Paperback Non-fiction chart, its paperback sales soaring to nearly a million copies sold in total. This year alone, the paperback has sold another 103,237 copies.
Harari’s follow-ups to Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, have also sold stunningly, with Homo Deus in fourth, and 21 Lessons’ paperback in fifth, with its 2018-published hardback in ninth in the translated chart. In total, Harari has shifted more than 1.5 million books in the UK, earning £12.5m. As current political events seem to spiral out of control—or rather, continue to spiral out of control as part of a trend over the past few years—Harari’s titles seem to have met a need to attempt to understand the changing global climate among the British (and worldwide) book-buying public.
Perhaps the much-heralded “up-lit” trend actually side-stepped fiction to land solidly in non-fiction instead. Another slightly-more-positive viewpoint of the world was put forward in Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists. A collection of the Dutch author’s articles for online journal De Correspondent, the title has sold 19,143 copies to date.
Sparking joy
Marie Kondo is another non-fiction author to feature multiple times in the translated chart, with The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying and Spark Joy hitting third and eighth place respectively. Kondo’s tidying guide sold more than 200,000 copies on its release in 2015, coinciding with the mindfulness trend that helped colouring books and hygge titles climb the charts. But it got a new lease of life this year with the start of Kondo’s Netflix show. In total, the Japanese folding guru has sold nearly 400,000 books in the UK alone—no doubt that’ll spark joy.
Though children’s books are thin on ground in the translated charts, the one that does make it is a sales behemoth: Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl is, of course, one of the bestselling books of the 20th century, and its 2007 edition charted 12th in the chart.