Women writers in translation in the UK: The “Year of Publishing Women” (2018) as a platform for collective change?

Translated literature makes up only 3.5% of the English-speaking book market, with women-authored fiction accounting for less than one-third of this total in the last decade, and literatures in ‘minor’ languages being noticeably underrepresented. However, recent initiatives have developed in the UK to promote translations into English and address this gender imbalance. One such initiative, ‘The Year of Publishing Women, ' challenged British publishers to mark the centenary of female suffrage by publishing only women authors in 2018. In this chapter, we measure the impact of such initiatives, by examining the circuits of translations of women-authored literature into English in the UK in 2018. Our analysis is based on questions about which women authors were translated into British English; what literary traditions they represent; what source systems they come from; in what historical period their literary productions are framed; and finally, whether the selection of these women authors reflects current debates in transnational feminist studies and its claims for activist solidarity/sorority among women coming from peripheral/marginalized contexts. The analysis leads to an understanding of the UK publishing industry in 2018 and consequently calls for an improvement of British understandings of gender identities and cultural diversity in the current sociopolitical context.