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.
This partial normalization of the region’s literature in Anglophone eyes has had mixed results. Consider, for instance, the absences it left. During the peak of the ‘post-communist’ phase, writers from the Czech lands commanded regiments of Western admirers: the fans of Milan Kundera, of Ivan Klíma, or of the (belatedly translated) Bohumil Hrabal. In the 2010s, though, very little new work from their corner of Central Europe found its way into English – the satirical novels of Jáchym Topol being a rare exception. Poland, on the other hand, did partly begin to resemble its neighbours to the West as a presence on the UK/US publishing scene. One sign of this shift was an unprecedented attention not only to high ‘literary’ fiction but genre
