In 2019, I interviewed international children’s book marketer Ellen Myrick for an article I was writing about literature in translation. Unprompted, she started telling me how hard it was to attend the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and realize how many of the world’s most exciting children’s books would not make it to the United States:

 “There are so many things at Bologna that have not come over here yet. I’d love to see more from South America here in the U.S. I think there are a few publishers that do South America very well, but not many. And, oh my God, there’s some amazing publishing being done there!”

Myrick’s remark stayed with me. Sadly, her observation of the dearth of children’s books from Latin America is still borne out by the data on translations. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, compiles translation data as part of its efforts to track diversity among children’s books. From 2018 to 2022, the CCBC logged a total of 38 titles imported from Latin America, about five percent of the total 732 translated books catalogued.  By contrast, there were more than six times as many translated from French (254 titles), and 102 from German. Spain alone racked up 93 titles, nearly two and a half times that of all of Latin America.  

The CCBC generates its data from books voluntarily submitted to them. Its results, therefore, do not represent all children’s books in print, and likely are weighted toward the larger publishers who have the marketing dollars to afford sending copies of titles they publish to the CCBC.  It is the smaller independent publishers, however, who are most active in issuing translations. Tapioca Stories, for instance, the only publisher in the United States to specialize in translations of picture books from Latin America, has released nine titles since its founding in 2020, but only two were included in the CCBC statistics through 2022.  

The CCBC data also suggest another important finding: how few young adult (YA) books are being translated, especially those from Latin America.  Between 2018 and 2022, just 70 young adult titles made it to English, just under 10% of the total number of children’s books in translation.¹  Of those, only seven were from Latin America!  Compare this to the findings of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival, which endeavors to maintain a comprehensive accounting of Latinx children’s books.² They have identified 396 young adult titles published in the United States since 2001 by Latinx creators. The Latinx Kidlit Book Festival database does not identify which books were originally written and published abroad and then translated here, only which titles are available for sale in Spanish.  They list a mere sixteen YA titles also available in Spanish since 2001.

It is this tremendous gap in books from other countries for teens that inspired the creation of the GLLI Translated YA Book Prize, now in its sixth year.  The prize was the brainchild of Annette Y. Goldsmith, librarian and academic, who has spent nearly two decades actively promoting international children’s literature.  As a member and later chair of the American Library Association’s (ALA) Mildred L. Batchelder Award and a member of USBBY’s Outstanding International Books Committee, she helped select the winners of the most important U.S. prizes and lists identifying and awarding translated literature for children. But she noticed that books for teens hardly came up.

So when German translator Rachel Hildebrandt Reynolds created the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative in 2015, a non-profit aimed at bringing more world literature to Americans, Goldsmith was eager to help out. She suggested creating a prize focused on translated literature for teenagers. In 2016, Goldsmith and Reynolds presented the idea to the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of ALA. They argued that a new award would speak to the ALA’s focus on diversity, support efforts to teach cultural competence to librarians, and “promote teen access to books that connect them with teen reading culture in other countries and languages.”

However, YALSA was reluctant to back a new award since its Michael L. Printz Award for literary excellence in young adult literature already accepted translations (though Goldsmith was quick to point out that translations were often lost among the large number of submissions). Further, YALSA estimated $2,000 in costs for setting up a new prize which Goldsmith and Reynolds would have to come up with, presumably through fundraising. After two years of trying to pitch their idea to YALSA, they decided that GLLI would go it alone… on a shoestring.  The key feature of the award they were envisioning was that it would be awarded to translators as well as authors and publishers. By contrast, the Batchelder Award is given to publishers, and the USBBY Outstanding International Books list recognizes the book itself.    

In a memo she wrote in early 2018, Goldsmith noted:

“The U.K. has the Marsh Award, Canada has the Governor General’s Awards for Translation (English to French, and French to English)… and we had nothing… until it was announced on January 31, 2018 that the National Book Awards is adding a category for translation of fiction and nonfiction, awarded jointly to the author and translator!”

The first GLLI Translated YA Book Prize committee was formed in the fall of 2018 with five committee members, including Goldsmith.  It survived its first years thanks to the dedication of the volunteer committee members and the enthusiasm of publishers eager to raise the profile of their translated titles. It operated so frugally that not a single expense was incurred until the committee had to print announcements of the shortlist to distribute at ALA’s Mid-Winter Conference in January 2019. 

That was how I first became involved: printing the announcements. The following year I joined the committee, and the year after that, I became committee chair. Along the way, I noticed there were some major gaps in the submission pool. During the first two years of the prize, only a single title from Latin America had been submitted and only one from Africa. Hence, I made it my personal goal to obtain more submissions from both regions.  

So it was to my great joy that two Brazilian titles jointly won the prize in 2021, and a third translated by the same translator in 2023. Their route to English translation shows how the passions and capabilities of an individual editor and the openness of a publisher can make a tremendous difference. 

Just before Labor Day 2018, David Levithan, author and editorial director at Scholastic Inc.’s PUSH imprint, presented a copy of Lucas Rocha’s Where We Go from Here to editor Orlando dos Reis, who was Brazilian-born and fluent in Portuguese.  By the end of the long weekend, Orlando was hooked, and came into work the following Tuesday with several chapters translated to show his colleagues.³

“I do remember going into the acquisitions meeting thinking, ‘I’m going to get questions’… But that really didn’t end up happening. Everybody really loved the read,” dos Reis recalls.

There were concerns, of course, about Scholastic’s ability to market the book with an author abroad, and whether the author could speak English. But that did not deter Scholastic from publishing Where We Go from Here nor the three other Brazilian titles later championed by dos Reis—which together make Scholastic the single largest publisher of young adult literature from Latin America. 

Dos Reis says he was not specifically looking to acquire books in translation when he started Where We Go from Here. “Now I feel more empowered to keep my eye on what is going on in Brazil and seeing what’s out there… Often I can download an ebook edition on Amazon, and I’ll be able to read it in Portuguese, and say, ‘Oh my God, this is actually really good!’”

Nor was Larissa Helena, who translated all three GLLI-winning titles, actively looking for translation work when dos Reis sought her assistance.  She had translated English into Portuguese before, but not the other way around.

“We were the perfect duo for this [book], she says, “because I am a native Brazilian and I came to English later in my life, and Orlando moved here when he was very young, so he is for all purposes a native English speaker, but one who was very comfortable with Portuguese and could fully understand everything. It was truly a partnership doing the translation, paying a lot of attention to the sound and voice… with Orlando then going in and making the small edits that would make it feel more culturally relevant for the U.S.”  

Helena had worked as an agent for a few years but had been discouraged by the difficulty she had bringing Latin American titles to the U.S. One American publisher even commented that their readers were “too provincial” to understand the titles she was promoting.

“This country is way more interested in stories of assimilation than it is in stories just from other places,” she discovered. Stories have to have a direct connection to readers’ lives. Readers “have to be able to go to school and think, oh yeah, that’s my Brazilian American friend and that’s why they eat rice and beans at home.”

Helena is grateful that she got the opportunity to work on the Scholastic books. “At the end of the day I did contribute to bringing Brazilian books to the U.S., not in the way that I thought, but in an incredible way.  I’m very proud of it.”

Prolific Spanish/English writer and translator Lawrence Schimel says one of the biggest problems international books face here is that most English-speaking editors are not themselves able to read in other languages.  That is why “having an editor at Scholastic like Orlando dos Reis who bought the three [soon to be four] books Larissa translated makes such a difference.”

Schimel says the Scholastic books had the added benefit that their themes tied into U.S. trends, such as the growing interest in queer YA.  Translation was therefore “a way of addressing issues, [such as] size positivity and acceptance, HIV… because no one in the English market was addressing those issues already. But they were still Latino enough [and] universal enough” to generate wide appeal.  

Schimel himself has authored 130 books and translated more than 150 more, mostly to or from Spanish. Very little of his work is for young adults, but that, he says, reflects his own reading and creative preferences, as well as those of the editors he knows.  Still, one of his titles, La Bastarda by Equatorial Guinea’s Trifonia Melibea Obono, was a GLLI honor book in 2019, and he is the translator of Mexican writer Ricardo Chávez Castañeda’s The Book of Denial, which was published in January 2024.  

He says there is plenty of demand for books about the Latino experience in Latin America and the U.S., particularly at the picture book level. The problem is “there isn’t enough attention that these kids grow up and they need more stories both about where they came from, the countries their neighbors come from, or just the rest of the world.”

Schimel believes U.S. publishers tend to want books that exhibit Latinidad: that is, they have to be about Latin identity. A book of children’s poems he translated “found a home in the U.K. because it’s not about being African, Latino, [and] may have been more difficult in the U.S.  That is because it’s not performing the identity politics; it’s just a book of children’s poetry.  The U.K. publisher didn’t have the same demands that I think a U.S. publisher would have had.”

Translators Schimel and Helena both say the disparity between what’s permissible in other cultures and what is not permissible in the U.S. also greatly affects what can be translated, and for what age. Says Schimel: “That’s why a lot of things will change age categories for something that 13- and 14-year-olds in Europe are completely comfortable with. But in the U.S., ‘Oh, that’s not middle grade, we have to bump that up to upper YA, because of casual smoking or sex,’ whatever it is that they’re doing. It’s not that kids in the U.S. don’t do it;  it doesn’t get published because the gatekeepers stop things differently. You see it in picture books a lot, where in a lot of other books you can have casual nudity on the beach, and it’s not a big deal; in the U.S. that’s a huge taboo.”  

Helena says she has seen YA in the United States trend younger over time.  She notes that a lot of Brazilian YA will go a little bit more into sex, into older themes that may be categorized as upper YA here.  “YA in Brazil tends to be 16 and up,” Helena says, and actual young adults, people in their early twenties, will read those books.  For instance, My Sweet Orange Tree, a classic in Brazil since 1968, translated by Alison Entrekin in 2019, is commonly assigned to children about age nine in Brazil, but is deemed YA in the United States because of its dark themes including poverty, violence, and death.

“The U.S. is very attached to a type of narrative,” Helena says, “a full story: that has a beginning, a middle and an ending. In some Brazilian books, it’s not quite like that.  The characters are just doing things; sometimes the illustrations are a little messy.  They can be more poetic. Sometimes the meaning is not so obvious. There is more room for play.”

Picture book publisher Tapioca Stories’ Yael Berstein has also run up against the rigidities of what the U.S. considers acceptable.  But she is hopeful.  Her efforts to bring classic children’s literature from South America are finding support among buyers and reviewers, even though the unconventional formats and illustrations don’t always meet U.S. expectations of children’s books—like including a half-filled wine cup on the cover of Tapioca picture book My Neighborhood.   

Helena believes the U.S. is a bit stuck in its ways right now. “Brazil can shout out about our literature as much as we want, and maybe that will give editors who are already interested a chance to look at the book, but I think that a change of mindset needs to happen here.”

Orlando dos Reis offers this advice:

“If you are an editor, why not look to [other] countries, and see what you can find?  Just treat [translations] like anything else.  If you connect with it, you feel that it would make a good fit for your list, [and] it would bring you joy… then go for it! The worst they can say is no.”

His next title from Brazil, London On My Mind by Clara Alves, translated by Nina Perrotta, is due out in June 2024.

Click here to watch the online presentation of the 2021 GLLI Translated YA Book Prize.

1 The CCBC does not categorize books as middle grade or young adult because there is no agreed-upon definition of what constitutes young adult vis-à-vis middle grade. I therefore had to inspect each non-picture book title individually and decide whether it should be classified as YA or MG.  

2 According to Latinx Kidlit Book Festival Education Team Coordinator Laekan Zea Kemp, “The database strives to encompass all books by Latinx authors and illustrators that have been published in the U.S. and are still in print, not just books by our festival participants… We have used publisher websites and catalogues, as well as announcements from Publishers Weekly and Publishers Marketplace to capture as many of these books as possible. Considering the fact that books by Latinx creators have never made up more than 10% of the market, it’s likely that we have nearly all or most of those books accounted for in our database.”

3 A number of months later, Rocha’s editor Rafaella Machado at Galera Record packaged his title, Levithan’s Two Boys Kissing, and George by Alex Gino into a “Kit Gay,” a trio of Portuguese-language books on LGBT themes.  She intended it as a marketing counter-punch to right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro’s fear-mongering during his 2018 election campaign, in which he claimed a so-called “Kit Gay” was being disseminated in schools to indoctrinate Brazilian youth.  In fact, the materials had been created by the Education Ministry years earlier to foster “School Without Homophobia.”

Photo: Morgan Vander Hart, Unsplash