The past decade has witnessed a decisive change in the role of books and writers from Central and Eastern Europe in the English-language literary marketplace. Until around 2010, it often seemed, the ‘post-communist’ paradigm still held sway. The books that caught the attention of UK and US publishers tended to reflect either the ordeals of the Iron Curtain decades, or the social upheavals that followed the breakdown of the Soviet empire. During the 2010s, however, the curse (or maybe blessing?) of this single, dominant story largely lifted from perceptions of the region’s literature.

Publishers and readers faced authors and works from, in Western terms, much more ‘normal’ societies. They came from places that felt closer than ever in political, geographical and human terms (think of the scale of migration to the UK from Poland and the Baltic states), but still in some ways more remote than the Western and Northern European cultures that continue to provide the bulk of translated works in the Anglosphere. There were exceptions: the ex-Yugoslav countries continued to be defined by the drama and trauma of the 1990s wars and their aftermath. And, for good or ill, stories of resistance and survival from World War II retained the power to reach and touch an enduringly large public in the UK and US alike.