A year of reading the world
ayearofreadingtheworld.com
196 countries, countless stories...
Articles11
This book came onto my radar during the brilliant event about writing female experience I attended at Hong Kong International Literary Festival earlier this month. The panel featured three local authors, who spoke arrestingly about how they capture the pressures facing young women in Hong Kong today. As soon as I heard the premise of […]
Just a week after I returned from the Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival in Assam, India, I jetted off again, this time to take part in the 25th annual Hong Kong International Literary Festival. My engagements there began with an intense schedule of school visits. Jetlag notwithstanding, I was picked up at 7.15am on my […]
Moldova was one of the trickiest European countries to source an English translation from when I set out to read a book from every country in 2012. After months of searching, I blind-bought The Story of An Ant by Ion Drutse, translated from the Moldovan by Iraida Kotrutse, a volume that I couldn’t help feeling […]
Last week I returned to Dibrugarh in Assam, India, for the third year running to take part in the Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival (DUILF). It’s a long journey for me to get to this part of the world – this time complicated by a cancelled flight – but it’s always worth it and it […]
In the midst of some pretty gloomy headlines over the last month or so, online African literature magazine Brittle Paper brought heartening news. Its 100 Notable African Books of 2025 shows up some encouraging trends: around a third of the titles on the list are translated from a broad spread of languages, including Shona, Malagasy […]
‘What have you got in that you’re excited about?’ I asked Hunter at the Folkestone Bookshop when I popped in a while back. As often happens when I walk into that place, this was the start of a long, fascinating conversation, in which I was ushered from shelf to shelf and table to table, and […]
Good news! If you’ve been wanting to try my incomprehension workshop, your chance has come! I’ll be offering a virtual taster session and chatting to super reader, blogger and all-round translation champion Marina Sofia at 7.30pm (UK time) on Tuesday 20 January 2026. Over the past few years I’ve run the workshop with readers of […]
As followers of this blog will know, my hero is Tété-Michel Kpomassie, the author of the landmark travel memoir An African in Greenland, translated by James Kirkup, which was my Togolese choice for my 2012 project to read a book from every country. After the book was rereleased as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2021, […]
Books come to me from many directions these days. Emails from publishers. Messages from readers of this blog. Suggestions from other writers. Reviews. Social media posts. Conversations with booklovers around the world. In many cases, I hear about books before they are available. And while I try not to focus on the latest thing on […]
I’m very fortunate to receive messages from readers and writers around the world telling me about books I might like to read. Many of the titles I’ve featured on this blog are the result of conversations with people in parts of the planet from which we English speakers rarely hear stories. Examples include: Glimmer of […]
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing that happened during my 2012 quest to read a book from every country (and there were many extraordinary things) involved the small African island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe. Of the 11 or so UN-recognised countries that had no commercially available literature in English translation at the time, this proved by far […]