Women in Translation: A Reading List
Verso celebrates Women in Translation Month 2022.
Happy Women in Translation Month! This reading list seeks to highlight and promote women writers from across all walks of life, all languages, and all experiences.
We are celebrating WITMonth by showcasing our incredible women writers in translation including legends such as Izumi Suzuki, Françoise d’Eaubonne and Rigoberta Menchú.
Until January 2, 2023 at 11:59PM EST, we have 40% off ALL books (see full details here)!
See all our reading lists, including The Year in 10 Books, Radicalize Your Niblings, Radical Happiness, Tis the Season to Abolish the Family, Understanding the Cost of Living Crisis, Christianity and Anticapitalism.
[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]“To mother is to murder, or close enough,” thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian.
A cat and mouse game of surveillance and psychological torment develops between a middle aged artist and her aging mother in this new novel from Vigdis Hjorth!
[book-strip index="2" style="buy"]In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always grounded in the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.
[book-strip index="3" style="buy"]These pages are illuminated by the enduring courage and passionate sense of justice of an extraordinary woman.
[book-strip index="4" style="buy"]Will and Testament is a lyrical meditation on trauma and memory, as well as a furious account of a woman’s struggle to survive and be believed. Vigdis Hjorth’s novel became a controversial literary sensation in Norway and has been translated into 20 languages.
[book-strip index="5" style="buy"]This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written in Hjorth’s trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.
[book-strip index="6" style="buy"]Jenny Hval’s latest novel is a radical fusion of feminist theory and experimental horror, and a unique treatise on magic, gender and art.
[book-strip index="7" style="buy"]This debut novel from critically acclaimed artist and musician Jenny Hval presents a heady and hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire.
[book-strip index="8" style="buy"]Originally published in French in 1974, radical feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne surveyed women’s status around the globe and argued that the stakes of feminist struggles were not about equality but about life and death—for humans and the planet.
[book-strip index="9" style="buy"]Polish feminist philosopher Ewa Majewska proposes a specifically feminist politics of antifascism.
[book-strip index="10" style="buy"]Combining family memoir, literary observation, and social commentary, Liang Hong’s by turns lyrically poetic and movingly raw investigation into the fate of her village became a bestselling book in China and brought her fame.
[book-strip index="11" style="buy"]Mithu Sanyal offers a bold, honest and unflinching look at how we think and talk about rape.
[book-strip index="12" style="buy"]Eileen Traux has written an immersive, incendiary takedown of US asylum procedure and despotism in the Mexican government. Rooted in narratives of individuals who have had to flee their homes due to various mainfestations of ongoing crises, Traux spotlights the human cost of an immigration system that is failing.
[book-strip index="13" style="buy"]Rossana Rossanda, a legendary figure on the Italian left, reflects on a life of radical commitment. Active as a communist militant in the Italian Resistance against fascism during World War Two, Rossanda rose rapidly in its aftermath, becoming editor of the Communist Party weekly paper and a member of parliament.
