Want to travel around the world without leaving your house? Just pick up a book that was translated from another language. Whether you are reading a novel originally written in French, a memoir originally written in Russian, or a book of poetry originally written in Korean, each book of translated literature is a window into another world.
Many university presses, which are mission-driven scholarly publishers usually associated with universities, have long been dedicated to publishing works of fiction and non-fiction from other languages into English, which allows these diverse authors to reach a much wider readership. In fact, at least 50 members of the Association of University Presses currently publish books in translation every year.
And this year, for the first time, a university press book translated from Uzbek (Yale University Press’s WE COMPUTERS by Hamid Ismailov), is a finalist for the National Book Award in translated literature.
So in honor of University Press Week, happening Nov. 10-14, here are 17 exemplary translated books (novels, poetry or short story collections, memoirs and non-fiction books), illustrating the ways that university presses collaborate with authors and translators to bring insights from around the world to English readers.
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NOVELS
WE COMPUTERS: A Ghazal Novel by Hamid Ismailov. Translated from Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega.
(Yale University Press, August 2025)
In this book, which was shortlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in translated literature, a French poet and psychologist in the 1980s builds a computer program capable of both analyzing and generating literature. But beyond the text on his screen there are entire worlds—of history, philosophy, and maybe even of love—in the stories and people he and AI conjure. Blending Sufi classics, absurdist dreams, careful mathematical calculations and lyrical narratives, Ismailov invents an ingenious transnational poetics of love and longing for the digital age.
Camille’s Lakou: A Novel by Marie Léticée. Translated from French by Kevin Meehan and Marie Léticée.
(Vanderbilt University Press, July 2025)
Camille’s Lakou tells the story of Camille, a young Caribbean girl living with her single mother in 1960s Guadeloupe, and follows her through to her adulthood, where she is living as a successful motivational speaker in Orlando. As Camille tells her assistant, Evelyn—a struggling single mother from Jamaica—about her life, she urges Evelyn to see her difficult life as one of great fortune. Author Marie Léticée explores neocolonial culture clash and identity conflict themes and fleshes out a time and place not well‑represented in Guadeloupean literature.
Rosa the Alligator by Marie-Célie Agnant. Translated from French by Amy B. Reid.
(Liverpool University Press, October 2025)
Marie-Célie Agnant is an internationally recognized author and poet dedicated to telling the silenced stories of Haiti’s past. Set in France, this 2007 novel focuses on two child victims of the Duvalier regime as they confront their traumatic history and their torturer, Rosa, a character based on the woman who led Papa Doc’s paramilitary death squads. The novel draws on the harrowing testimony of survivors and asks questions not only about the conflicting goals of justice, truth and reconciliation, but also about how one lives with the knowledge of crimes against humanity.
The Man of Middling Height by Fadi Zaghmout. Translated from Arabic by Wasan Abdelhaq
(Syracuse University Press, August 2025)
What if our society’s deepest prejudices weren’t about race, gender or sexuality—but height? In his groundbreaking allegorical novel, acclaimed Jordanian author Fadi Zaghmout imagines just such a world, crafting a powerful novel that speaks directly to our contemporary debates about identity. The novel follows a short dressmaker whose life is upended when she meets Tallan, a man whose middle height places him outside the rigid tall/short binary that governs their society. As their forbidden romance blossoms, they must navigate a world where height determines everything.
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POETRY AND SHORT STORIES
The Odyssey by Homer. Translated from Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn.
(University of Chicago Press, April 2025)
Celebrated author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn brings Homer’s great epic to vividly poetic new life. Rejecting the streamlining and modernizing approach of many recent translations, Mendelsohn artfully reproduces the epic’s formal qualities—meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance—and in so doing restores to Homer’s masterwork its archaic grandeur. It is the richest, most ample, most precise, and most musical Odyssey in English, conveying the beauty of its poetry, the excitement of its hero’s adventures, and the profundity of its insights.
Flatfish: Poems, A Bilingual Edition by Moon Tae-jun. Translated from Korean by Jae Won Edward Chung.
(Rutgers University Press, October 2025)
In the first bilingual edition of Flatfish, a poetry collection by Korean poet Moon Tae-jun, the author explores his inner self. At times sparse and allusive, Moon’s poems use blank space and other stylistic considerations to convey a voice and thought that ranges from the contemplative to the surreal and absurd. Moon’s poems suggest Buddhist ideologies and Korean temples, yet the works remain largely free of cultural-specific imagery and are, instead, naturalistic or universal.
No by Idea Vilariño. Translated from Spanish by María José Zubieta and J. Martin Daughtry.
(Carnegie Mellon University Press, October 2025)
No is poet Idea Vilariño’s final masterpiece, where poetry becomes both refusal and resilience. In this poetry collection, Vilariño strips poetry to its essence—distilling love, loss, and the inexorable passage of time into spare yet searing verses. From its stark nihilism emerges a poetic voice that insists on being heard, even as it denies life’s joys. This bilingual edition preserves Vilariño’s rhythmic precision and existential intensity, giving readers a rare glimpse into a body of work that continues to resonate far beyond its origins.
When We Have Only the Earth by Abdourahman A. Waberi. Translated from French by Nancy Naomi Carlson.
(University of Nebraska Press, March 2025)
In this ode to the earth and all its living creatures, French Djiboutian poet, novelist, and essayist Abdourahman A. Waberi sounds the alarm about our imperiled planet, where “the Sahel rises in you, in me / the Red Sea boils in you, in me / Nunvut is melting in you, in me.” This translation by Nancy Naomi Carlson preserves the rich musicality of the original French, as well as its frequent use of wordplay and often unusual word choice.
‘The White Horse’ and Other Stories by Emilia Pardo Bazán. Translated from Spanish by Robert M. Fedorchek.
(Bucknell University Press, November 2025)
Spanish writer, intellectual, and feminist Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921) was a master of the short form and practitioner of the style that became known as naturalism. This collection gathers 27 of her stories in English translation, revealing the narrative complexity, keen psychological insight, and careful attention to realistic detail that was characteristic of her work. Pardo Bazán’s themes are fear, love, hatred, forgiveness, cruelty, repentance, homesickness, and madness—that is, naked reality as experienced across social strata in her time.
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MEMOIR
Between Prison and Freedom: Memoir of a Soviet Dissident by Alexander Podrabinek. Translated from Russian by Marian Schwartz.
(University of Notre Dame Press, August 2025)
This thrilling memoir documents the early life of Russian journalist and human rights activist Alexander Podrabinek as he and other dissidents fearlessly fought against the Soviet Union. From silently protesting at Pushkin Square to being exiled in a brutal prison camp, this book is a powerful tribute to the Russian dissidents who fought for freedom and justice while trying to evade the KGB. Podrabinek captures the painful intersections between personal and political in a dissident’s life, and the solidarity that kept the resistance moving forward.
Alive in Their Garden: The True Story of the Mirabal Sisters and Their Fight for Freedom by Dedé Mirabal. Translated from Spanish and edited by Ana E. Martínez and Heather Hennes.
(University Press of Florida, February 2025)
In 1960, the three sisters—Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa Mirabal, code-named “Las Mariposas” (The Butterflies) by a Dominican underground resistance movement—were assassinated by order of a dictator. Alive in Their Garden is the memoir of Dedé Mirabal, their surviving sister, who for decades kept her sisters alive in Dominican memory, and it includes an introduction by Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies. In this edition, translators Ana Martínez and Heather Hennes add a preface and explanatory notes that give additional context to the story.
My Seven Mothers by Pernille Ipsen. Translated from Danish by Tiina Nunnally.
(University of Minnesota Press, October 2025)
In this intimate portrait of life during the exhilarating early days of the women’s liberation movement in Scandinavia in the 1970s, Pernille Ipsen tells the stories of the seven women who raised her, who were all part of the women’s movement in Denmark. My Seven Mothers is an eye-opening account of the challenges and possibilities connected with liberation and radical social change during the 1970s. In this time of fierce struggles over family, sexuality, and child-rearing, it reminds us that new worlds are always possible.
Raymond Klibansky: A Life in Philosophy by Raymond Klibansky and Georges Leroux. Translated from French by Peter Feldstein.
(McGill-Queen’s University Press, September 2025)
Born in Paris in 1905 to a German-Jewish family from Frankfurt and dying a century later in Montreal, Raymond Klibansky was a philosopher whose work focused on platonic studies and the history of ideas. In this richly illustrated autobiography, Georges Leroux presents dialogues with Klibansky, who was his mentor at McGill University, exploring themes including philosophical traditions, melancholy, tolerance, peace, and the role of philosophy in international relations.
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NONFICTION
Inventing the Church: The Pull of the Past in Ecclesial Politics by Bénédicte Sère. Translated from French by Caroline Wazer.
(Columbia University Press, November 2025)
Why is the official narrative of the history of the Catholic Church so discordant with the archival sources of the Middle Ages? From the 15th century down to the present day, the Church has constructed an identity and a past at odds with what the records show—expanding the authority and power of the papacy in ways that have striking broader political implications. This audacious and nuanced book explores how the Church has repeatedly invented and reinvented itself through a constant back-and-forth between narratives of the Middle Ages and modernity.
Nordic Socialism by Pelle Dragsted. Translated from Danish by William Banks.
(University of Wisconsin Press, August 2025)
In recent years, the Nordic countries have been the envy of the world for their economic success, institutional stability, and consistently high levels of social happiness. But are they socialist? Author Pelle Dragsted, a member of the Danish parliament and the leader of the socialist political party in Denmark, says Denmark and the rest of the Nordic countries are socialist, but only in part. He says the dangers come from the unhealthy encroachment of capitalism, and his provocative argument is that capitalism and socialism are not, in fact, mutually exclusive.
The Complete Writings: Zhuguangzi Translated from ancient Chinese by Chris Fraser.
(Oxford University Press, February 2025)
The Zhuangzi—an anthology of anonymous writings produced in China between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC—is one of the world’s great literary treasures and the single most important source for early Daoist philosophy that had a profound influence on Chinese thought, literature, and culture, an even visual art. This volume provides a complete, annotated English translation of the Zhuangzi that guides readers in understanding and appreciating the text in smooth, idiomatic English carefully formulated to reflect the phrasing and nuances of the original Chinese.
Angalkut/Shamans in Yup’ik Oral Tradition, edited by Ann Fienup-Riordan. Translated from Yup’ik by Alice Rearden and Marie Meade.
(University of Alaska Press imprint, University Press of Colorado, October 2025)
This book is a collection of oral histories about “angalkut,” or shamans, that used to be part of indigenous culture in Alaska and other parts of the Arctic. First-person accounts are presented in the original Yup’ik language with accompanying English translations, which discuss the importance of shamans and the critical role they played in Yup’ik life—healing the sick, interpreting dreams and unusual experiences, requesting future abundance through masked dances and other ceremonies, protecting the lives of young children, and dealing with the dead.
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Find more university press titles featured on the University Press Week reading list, along with a schedule of University Press Week events.