The boy lay down in the middle of the street. All alone.

I thought about the eyes of the girl standing tall with her cut hair. Suddenly, the sun rose.

He needed a phone more than anyone in our prison ward.

Fiction came to us from the West. Creativity did not.

For Sámi literature to continue playing its essential role in our culture and to expand its benefits, we need more writers, readers, and translators, which is impossible without support—both financially and through the education system.

Languages are particularly challenging to exhibit physically in museums—how then to tell the story of our most precious forms of intangible cultural heritage in a tangible form?

The children ask where they are going. They, too, have begun to grasp that they are not heading home.

When we celebrate the increasing visibility of translation, we should also ask about what languages and literatures—and, consequently, what human experiences—are afforded visibility.

In 2014, translating Uyghur knowledge into English felt like a subversive act in itself.

Reading Roth’s Berlin miniatures, a sense of the dynamic between sociability and justice feels essential to the urban experience.

Empire made English my mother tongue—and the only one I have any real dominion over.

In English, Hindi, and Bangla—the languages I use daily—we spoke only of death and distress.

Cristina Pérez Díaz writes about four Puerto Rican poets whose work operates in the constructions of queer bodies and of the nation.

I like to imagine that, in this defining moment, as my grandfather struggled with the dead man’s sinews, he was able to calm his rage for a moment and laugh.

Hypocrite that I am, I never acknowledged my true self out of cowardice, out of fear of being misunderstood, and, more than anything else, because I thought if they knew what I was, they’d despise me.

Home is an ever-changing aspiration, not a truth or guarantee.

The transworld was so beautiful, so vast! There was so much to explore!

Anything audible can be remembered.

Two go-betweens working a corrupt legal system find themselves being recruited by a dangerous employer in this story from Fernanda Melchor's This Is Not Miami, nominated for the 2023 National Book Award for Translation.

We will need new maps as well as the courage and humor of travelers who won’t hesitate to stick their heads outside the sphere of the world-up-to-this-point, beyond the horizon of existing dictionaries and encyclopedias.

Join us Wednesday, June 8, at 6 PM ET as New Yorker critic Merve Emre talks with WWB Books Editor Adam Dalva about her journey as a critic and the2022 International Booker Prize. Registration is free.

Nearing its twentieth anniversary, the premier publication for international literature reimagines what is to come.

Which experiences have a greater influence on us—our successes, or the times when we've been hurt?

We couldn't be more excited about our new, state-of-the-art home for international literature.

One is drawn toward handwritten manuscripts because, unlike more mediated forms of writing (whether produced by typewriters, word processors, or automatic transcription tools), they alone retain the signs of hesitation.

The microphones of Radio Antenna Capri are rapt witnesses to a minor page of modern history—even if the chapter of history in question is the saga of the Neapolitan gasconade, not the annals of the pop beat.

It is all the more disturbing, then, that neither Gyllenhaal in her interviews nor the film’s end credits or press kit makes any mention of the translator whose work was the basis for the script: Ann Goldstein.

Despite this recent wave of SFT, there are still a number of barriers preventing more of it from going mainstream in the Anglophone world.

We highlight 9 writers working in their heritage languages, from Galician and Cebuano to Guaraní and Kaaps.

While some of this writing engages directly with the country's history of armed conflict with Russia, the majority addresses more quotidian themes.

WWB Campus presents a collection of Korean literature and accompanying resources for high school and college classrooms.

Some of the animals here possess the power of speech, deploying it to often subversive ends.

Words Without Borders is pleased to announce the election of acclaimed author Calvin Baker to its Board of Directors. “I am a great admirer of Calvin’s writing. A brilliant writer…

Today, a young writer working in Spanish arrives in New York City to find no shortage of role models.

We're pleased to welcome Allison Tim as the first-ever WWB education fellow. Allison is a writer, photographer, and budding filmmaker. After graduating from Macalester College with…

I see translation as a way for me to engage with one facet of my country’s literature, a hopefully productive excuse to read works in Tagalog and Bikol.

I’d accumulated what is surely the biggest collection of gem-like K-pop lyrics in the world.

Language is more than just a method of communication. It is about the ability to lay down roots, to settle into an identity, to have a place in history, in the present, and in the future. Language is…

We’re pleased to welcome Adam Dalva as the new books editor of Words Without Borders.Adam’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the Paris…

For multilingual writers, choosing to write in their heritage languages can be seen as an expression of agency, an active choice to communicate in a nondominant language.

Like most Colombians, I had several close encounters with “chaos” during those years.

Last night, Naveen Kishore, the founder and publisher of Seagull Books, received the 2021 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature. At the celebratory cocktail reception in New…

This prize-winning translation haunts.

PEN members today not only gather for literary events in their home countries and internationally but also defend writers and the freedom to write worldwide.

As a pandemic defined by isolation stretches ever onward, our third Poems in Translation Contest brought together 606 poems from 327 poets and 79 countries, translated from 61 languages. We are thrilled…

The sense of slipping slowly into chaos is an everyday reality here.

We are pleased to announce that Naveen Kishore, publisher and founder of Seagull Books in Kolkata, will receive the 2021 Words Without Borders Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature.“In…

We’re pleased to welcome Bruna Dantas Lobato as WWB’s digital marketing and communications coordinator. Bruna is a Brazilian writer and literary translator whose writing has…

Linguistic threads. IV lines and blood cells. Oppressive silencing. There is a viscerality that emerges when sitting with Rahma Nur’s poem “Fili Linguistici.” In describing her experience as…

What is national literature and how is it defined? Often, when one thinks of a particular nation or language, they imagine a specific phenotype tied to a historical narrative. A cursory Google search…

Somali-Italian writer Igiaba Scego recalls her childhood experiences in the Italian educational system in this memoir.

I have suffered a strange sense of nostalgia for the pain of a journey I have never taken.

In the wake of 2020’s racist violence, and subsequent organizing by the Black Lives Matter movement and others to combat white supremacy, literary magazines and publishers everywhere have, to differing…

Translator Anton Hur takes a hard look at race and translation in this essay.

Scholar and translator Corine Tachtiris reflects on the inherent privilege of translating while White in this essay.And if there are few Black translators, there are few representatives of the possibility…

Translator Yilin Wang addresses various forms of bias in translation from Asian Languages in this essay.“You must teach yourself how to carry loan words,tiny seeds gift-wrapped like hand-me-down heirlooms…

This year we celebrate Pride Month with seven pieces depicting Queer characters confronting decisive moments.

When I was twenty-three, I met my first girlfriend, who then went off with a man after just four months—and eventually married him.

Mauritanian literature foregrounds characters on the move.

I have come to think of any “definitive text” largely the same way that I think of a mother tongue, at least in my case: an inherently debatable, perpetually relative concept.