Queer Literature in Translation to Celebrate Pride Month 2024
This June and year-round, we’re proud to celebrate queer literature from writers all over the world.
Continuing our past installments of book recommendations for Pride Month, we’ve compiled a list of eight titles that hail from Equatorial Guinea, Taiwan, France, Morrocco and beyond, all published in English in recent years.
This June and year-round, we’re proud to celebrate queer literature from writers all over the world.
Continuing our past installments of book recommendations for Pride Month, we’ve compiled a list of eight titles that hail from Equatorial Guinea, Taiwan, France, Morrocco and beyond, all published in English in recent years.
These novels and poetry collections are scintillating depictions of queer vitality—the power of a life defined by resistance, exploration, and love in spite of societal pressures to conform. The following books (and those beyond this list) are a continuous work of storytelling, thereby upholding the international queer community and celebrating its literary achievements.
1. LA BASTARDA by Trifonia Melibea Obono,(opens in a new tab) translated by Lawrence Schimel
The first novel by an Equatorial Guinean woman to be translated into English, La Bastarda is the story of the orphaned teen Okomo, who lives under the watchful eye of her grandmother and dreams of finding her father. Forbidden from seeking him out, she enlists the help of other village outcasts: her gay uncle and a gang of “mysterious” girls reveling in their so-called indecency. Drawn into their illicit trysts, Okomo finds herself falling in love with their leader and rebelling against the rigid norms of Fang culture.
2. Sphinx by Anne Garréta(opens in a new tab), translated from the French by Emma Ramadan
Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta. A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, “I,” and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language.
3. Decapitated Poetry by Ko-Hua Chen(opens in a new tab), translated by Wen-Chi Li and Colin Bramwell
Ko-hua Chen’s Decapitated Poetry was the first explicitly queer book of poems published in Taiwan and remains a foundational work in Taiwanese poetry. Decades after it first appeared in 1995, this collection retains the capacity to shock, appall, and jolt readers into recognizing homosexuality as its own specific category of being.
4. I’m a Fool to Want You by Camila Sosa Villada(opens in a new tab), translated by Kit Maude
These dazzling stories from the internationally acclaimed author of Bad Girls erase the fine line between fantasy and reality, and establish her as an impressive literary voice. In the 1990s, a woman makes a living as a rental girlfriend for gay men. In a Harlem den, a travesti gets to know none other than Billie Holiday. A group of rugby players haggle over the price of a night of sex, and in return they get what they deserve. Nuns, grandmothers, children, and dogs are never what they seem…
(opens in a new tab)5. An Arab Melancholia (opens in a new tab)by Abdellah Taïa(opens in a new tab), translated by Frank Stock
An autobiographical portrait of a gay Arab man, living between cultures, seeking an identity through love and writing. Salé, near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running until he’s out of breath. He’s running after his dream, his dream to become a movie director. He’s running after the Egyptian movie star, Souad Hosni, who’s out there somewhere, miles away from this neighborhood—which is a place the teenager both loves and hates, the home at which he is not at home, an environment that will only allow him his identity through the cultural lens of shame and silence.
6. VIOLETS by Kyung-sook Shin(opens in a new tab), translated by Anton Hur
In this novel by a Man Asian Literary Prize-winning author, a neglected young woman experiences the violence and isolation of contemporary Korean society. San is twenty-two and alone when she happens upon a job at a flower shop in Seoul’s bustling city center. Haunted by childhood rejection, she stumbles through life—painfully vulnerable, stifled, and unsure. She barely registers to others, especially by the ruthless standards of 1990s South Korea. Over the course of one hazy, volatile summer, San meets a curious cast of characters: the nonspeaking shop owner, a brash coworker, kind farmers, and aggressive customers. Fueled by a quiet desperation to jump-start her life, she plunges headfirst into obsession with a passing magazine photographer.
Giovanna Lomanto is a poet and essayist with a tendency to play the same song on repeat until she has memorized every last note. She received her BA in English at U.C. Berkeley and finished her MFA at NYU, during which time she published two poetry collections and two mixed media chapbooks.
