2022 seems to have a been a good year for translations: fully one-half of this year’s (as always, subjective) list of books we thought worthy of particular mention were in translation in languages from Persian and Turkish to Bahasa Indonesia and Korean. The balance is shared between English fiction, poetry and non-fiction: memoir, history and art. The year refers to the date of review, not of publication. Click on the title for the review. Some also have podcasts.
Works in Translation
- Cocoon by Zhang Yueran
- Celia, Misoka, I by Xue Yiwei
- Graft by Li Peifu
- In the Roar of the Machine, selected poems of Zheng Xiaoqiong
- Kingdoms in Peril: A Novel of the Ancient Chinese World at War by Feng Menglong
- Saha by Cho Nam-joo
- Broken Summer by JM Lee
- The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo
- Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada
- Dead-End Memories by Banana Yoshimoto
- Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada
- Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi
- Solo Dance by Li Kotomi
- Woman Running in the Mountains by Yūko Tsushima
- Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumotō
- Chinatown by Thuận
- People from Bloomington by Budi Darma
- Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu
- Amanat: Women’s Writing From Kazakhstan, edited by Zaure Batayeva and Shelley Fairweather-Vega
- The Shehnai Virtuoso and Other Stories by Dhumketu
- Hafez in Love by Iraj Pezeshkzad
- Bitter Orange Tree by Jokha Alharthi
- Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk
- Prisoner of the Infidels: The Memoir of an Ottoman Muslim in Seventeenth-Century Europe by Osman of Timisoara
- The Pachinko Parlour by Elisa Shua Dusapin
English-language fiction and poetry
- On Java Road by Lawrence Osborne
- The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai [podcast]
- Sojourn by Amit Chaudhuri
- Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
- Cold Enough For Snow by Jessica Au
- I Was the President Mistress!! by Miguel Syjuco
- Thank You, Mr Nixon by Gish Jen [podcast]
- The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang [podcast]
- The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
- Dialect of Distant Harbors, poetry by Dipika Mukherjee
Non-fiction
- The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire by Joseph Sassoon [podcast]
- The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir by Karen Cheung [podcast]
- Himalaya: Exploring the Roof of the World by John Keay [podcast]
- The Lion House: The Coming of a King by Christopher de Bellaigue
- In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition by Aanchal Malhotra
- Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Historic Journey to China by Jennifer Lin [podcast]
- The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire by Henrietta Harrison
- False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma by Manu S Pillai [podcast]
- The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam by Christopher Goscha
- The Mongol World, edited by Timothy May and Michael Hope
- Japan 1900: A Portrait in Color by Sebastian Dobson and Sabine Arqué
- Persian Manuscripts and Paintings from the Berenson Collection, edited by Ayşin Yoltar-Yıldırım
- Art in the First Cities of Iran and Central Asia: The Sarikhani Collection by Agnès Benoit
- Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World, edited by Jeffrey Spier, Timothy Potts and Sara E Cole
- Carbon Technocracy Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia by Victor Seow