ANNE WORLD-WIDE
I LOVE getting foreign editions of my books.
It means a far, far wider audience with no more work from me. (That's the translator's job.) But if the book turns out to be a success in Mexico, say, or Korea, I'll reap the benefit. I'm proud as well as astonished that my books are now translated into forty five languages. Some countries take almost everything I've written. Others pick just a few. That in itself is interesting - what "travels well" and what doesn't.
A great deal of the pleasure comes from simply opening the packages and seeing the unfamiliar covers. There are some very "foreign" foreign languages, and sometimes the covers are also so bizarre that I can't guess at first which book it is. At other times it's clear from the illustration, which may even be the original cover, perhaps tweaked a little.
I do work hard on every single book I write. So there's a satisfying feeling in walking past a bookshop in Spain, or sitting in an airport in Germany, and seeing one of my own books just waiting to be sold and read, even if I couldn't make head or tail of it in that language myself.
The Icelandic edition of Diary of a Killer Cat (left) is easily recognised, but would you have known that every book in the panel on the right is a different edition of Flour Babies? Have a look at the new Covers Gallery and see how many you can identify!
Not every foreign edition is a translation, of course: there are US editions, where you might not notice the different spelling unless you were looking out for it. Sometimes these have different covers, and some books even have different titles in the USA. And not every translation is a foreign edition: some of Anne's books have been translated into Welsh!
Click any cover below to discover books by Anne Fine in Italian / in italiano, in French / en français, in German / auf Deutsch, in a variety of other languages and in the the USA.
