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American publisher Dalkey Archive is launching a world-wide annual anthology series next year, which will bring contemporary European authors to an English-language audience. The inaugural issue, Best European Fiction 2010, will be published in January and will be edited by respected Bosnian novelist Aleksandar Hemon.
The project, which is a collaboration with the Arts Council England and a number of other partners, is described as "a unique, highly ambitious project to promote European literature". The series was two years in the making.
John O’Brien, publisher of Dalkey Archive Press, said: "We’ve been publishing world literature for over twenty years, and those books have always found more readers than the media seems to believe, but there’s only so much you can do. A country like Albania, for instance, might have one book translated into English in ten years, and that one book is supposed to stand in for all of Albanian literature, which of course it can’t."
By creating an annual anthology, with work from countries such as Croatia, Iceland, Lithuania and Bulgaria, O’Brien said he hoped to give readers more immediate access to contemporary currents across European literature.
Best European Fiction 2010 will feature a preface by Zadie Smith and stories from 35 countries and regions by many authors who have never been published in English before, as well as more familiar names, such as Alasdair Gray.
In his introduction to the volume, Hemon wrote: "At the heart of the project is a profound, non-negotiable need for communication with the world, wherever it may be. The same need is at the heart of the project of literature."
Kate Griffin, international literature officer for Arts Council England, added: "Recognising that work originally written in English travels the world, whereas the level of world literature available in English is very low, Arts Council England is keen to encourage more translation of international writing into English.
"We have particular enthusiasm for the fact that Best European Fiction will make languages and literatures not often translated into English available to readers in the UK, and are also pleased to be working in partnership with so many other cultural institutes across Europe to support the publication and promotion of this exciting project."