LONDON — For most of the last half-century, fiction translated into English accounted for about 3 percent of the novels sold in Britain, a figure so stable that publishers treated it as a law of nature. That law has been repealed.
Translated fiction made up 18.4 percent of adult fiction sales by value in Britain in the first nine months of 2026, according to figures released on Monday by a London market research firm that tracks point-of-sale data, the highest share since records began and up from 11 percent in 2022. Among buyers aged 18 to 34, the share was 27 percent.
“We used to say translated fiction was a niche,” said Fiona Marchbanks, publishing director at Harcourt Street, an independent London house whose list is now 60 percent translated. “It is not a niche. It is what young readers think fiction is. They do not see a Korean novel or a Norwegian novel as foreign. They see it as a novel.”
The growth has been led by Japanese, Korean, and Scandinavian fiction, which together accounted for about half of translated sales, but the fastest growth this year has come from Spanish, Polish, and Arabic. The best-selling translated novel of the year so far is a 190-page Japanese story about a cat café, which has sold 410,000 copies in Britain. The second is a Norwegian historical novel about a 19th-century widow’s accounts.
Publishers and booksellers attribute the shift to several causes at once. Short, atmospheric translated novels travel well on video platforms, where young readers recommend books to one another in 30-second clips. Independent presses, which have invested in translation for decades, have been joined by the large houses, which now bid aggressively for foreign rights. And translators themselves have become visible: their names appear on covers, they are interviewed, and several have followings of their own.
“Ten years ago the translator’s name was on the title page in 8-point type,” said Alice Pemberton, who translates from Norwegian and Danish and whose name now appears on the covers of all her books. “Now readers will follow a translator from one author to the next. That has never happened before in my lifetime.”
The boom has had consequences upstream. Advances for translated fiction, long nominal, have risen sharply, with several debut novels from Spain and Poland reportedly selling for six figures in sterling this year. Translators’ fees, which Ms. Pemberton said had been “flat for a generation,” have risen about 20 percent since 2023, according to the Translators Association, though they remain modest relative to the sums involved.
Some in the industry see a bubble. “Everyone is buying everything,” said Tomasz Wierzbicki, a literary scout in London who works for publishers in several countries. “Some of these books are wonderful and some of them are being bought because they are from the right country this year. In two years we will find out which.”
At a bookshop in Hackney on Monday afternoon, a 24-year-old graduate student named Priya Sandhu was holding a Polish novel and a Chilean one and trying to decide. “I do not really think about where they are from,” she said. “I think about whether my friend liked it.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 15 of the European edition with the headline: Translated Fiction Hits a Record Share of British Book Sales, Driven by Readers Under 35.
