Translated fiction has enjoyed a huge boom in recent years, with the successes of The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (trans. Lucia Graves) and Irène Némirovsky’s astonishing Suite Française (trans. Sandra Smith) which have both sold over a million copies worldwide.

These sensational novels have gone some way to widen the appeal for fiction in translation in the UK. In spite of this, translated fiction still only counts for 3% of the UK book market. In Europe however, this figure is closer to 30%. Either we can despair of this disgracefully low figure, or we can celebrate the fact that 3% of well over 100,000 books published in the UK every year is still a lot of books.

Booktrust is now championing the cause by launching the first UK-based website solely for fiction in translation. We want to support the authors; the publishers who have committed themselves to publishing these books in a highly competitive and increasing homogeneous market; and the translators – the unsung heroes of contemporary literature – whose intelligence and creativity render into English novels that deserve to be read all over the world.

The new website www.translatedfiction.org.uk features:

• a bibliography of titles currently available in the UK (novels and short stories)
• reviews
• extracts
• a news section, highlighting new and forthcoming titles and events
• a features section for articles and interviews

The website also carries exclusive contributions from writers such as Daniel Hahn, who won the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his translation of The Book of Chameleons.

Daniel Hahn, author and winner of Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2007:
"Translation is one of the tools we need to make sense of the world beyond our usual field of vision; yet the process itself is scarcely examined, too rarely explored by readers, too rarely explained by those who practice it and those who study it. The excellent new Booktrust website is a perfect forum for these things to happen – for the promotion of translated work in the UK, and for an exploration of the processes that produce it, a place to ask questions and shed light on the issues that surround it. It will become invaluable for translators and other writers, of course, but for all kinds of other curious and critical reader too."