A Tiny Press Took a Big Risk on Experimental Books. It Paid Off.
A few years ago, the translator Jeremy Tiang was browsing in a bookstore in Singapore when he came across an unusual book of stories.
Written in Chinese under a pen name, the book, 'Delicious Hunger,' drew on the author Hai Fan's 13 years fighting in the jungles of Malaysia and southern Thailand as a guerrilla soldier with the Malayan Communist Party.
Tiang knew it might be hard to land an English-language publisher for a story collection from a Singaporean author writing under a pseudonym. But there was one publisher, a small press in Britain called Tilted Axis, that was known for seeking out subversive, experimental works in translation. Tiang submitted a sample, and Tilted Axis snapped it up.
Tiang's translation, released in Britain last fall, won an English PEN Translates Award, becoming the first book from Singapore to win the prize.
Publishing it in the United States proved more difficult. 'Delicious Hunger' was submitted to 29 American publishers, but none made an offer.
So Tiang was elated when he learned that Tilted Axis is expanding its footprint to North America. 'Delicious Hunger' will go on sale here this June, one of nearly 20 titles from the Tilted Axis catalog coming out in the United States this year. The first batch arrives this month.
'I don't know that the book would have found its way into translation or into the U.S. or U.K. distribution without someone like Tilted Axis to give it a platform,' said Tiang, who has translated more than 30 books from Chinese into English. 'All too often it's small, scrappy presses that take these risks, and they pay off.'
Since its founding a decade ago, Tilted Axis has gained a reputation for bringing out a wide range of groundbreaking, genre-defying literature in translation. With only eight employees working part-time on a tight budget, it has published 42 books translated from 18 languages, including Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Eastern Armenian, Kazakh, Kannada, Bengali, Uzbek and Turkish.
Publishing works from languages, regions and subcultures that have long been overlooked, they face little competition from bigger houses, which tend to gravitate toward established trends and books with a proven market (see Scandinavian noir and Japanese healing fiction). Perhaps for that reason, Tilted Axis has carved out a unique literary niche, and has caught the attention of critics and prize juries, landing major awards and winning acclaim for writers who were unknown in the Anglophone world.
'There are so many different forms of literature that people don't even know exist because we don't have access to them,' said Kristen Vida Alfaro, Tilted Axis' publisher. 'Every translation from different parts of the world has the potential to give you not just a different perspective, but a window into an entirely different imagination.'
At a moment when nationalism and isolationism are rising in both Europe and the United States, the window that literature can provide into other cultures feels essential, Alfaro said.
'What we publish, and who we are and the community that we've created, it's exactly what this climate is trying to eradicate,' she said.
With its emphasis on overlooked languages and narratives that often have a queer or feminist bent, Tilted Axis has helped to transform the landscape for translated fiction, which makes up just a small fraction of the work published in English, and remains heavily Eurocentric.
The number of translated titles released in the United States has hovered around just a few hundred titles a year for much of the past decade.
'Literature from Asia was generally ignored before specialist publishers like Tilted Axis,' said Anton Hur, whose translations include the Tilted Axis title 'Love in the Big City,' Sang Young Park's novel about a young gay man's romantic escapades in Seoul.
Translators and authors say Tilted Axis is also helping to transform the field of translation — bucking longstanding conventions around not only what gets translated, but who gets to translate, and how.
For decades, the profession was dominated by white translators who came from academic backgrounds. Tilted Axis often hires translators from the global south, many of whom grew up steeped in the language and cultures of the books they are working on. Ten of their translators published their debut translations with the press, and several more first-time translators have books under contract.
Tilted Axis put translators' names prominently on its covers from the start, well before it became more common. It also gives them a cut of royalties and sub-licensing deals, which is still not the standard. Its small staff includes several translators who collectively speak more than a half dozen languages.
To draw more people into the field, Tilted Axis has organized translation workshops, including two programs in London last year that focused on Vietnamese and Filipino literature. It published a book on the art of translation, which explores the way colonial legacies have shaped literary translation, and features essays from 24 writers and translators. The anthology, 'Violent Phenomena,' is now taught at university translation programs in the United States and Britain.
'What translations get published, who gets to translate, all these issues are still a huge problem,' said Khairani Barokka, a writer who also translates from Bahasa Indonesia into English, and who contributed to the anthology.
The Chinese writer Yan Ge said she was surprised to find an English-language publisher for her novel, 'Strange Beasts of China,' a surreal story about an amateur cryptozoologist who studies otherworldly creatures. Since its release in China in 2006, it had never drawn any offers from Western publishers.
When Tilted Axis released the translation by Jeremy Tiang in 2020, it drew admiring reviews and comparison to works by Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino.
Tilted Axis embraced the novel's weirdness, and helped her find 'space where I can exist as a writer in the English language,' Yan said.
'They don't try to shoehorn anything to fit into this imaginary English reader's taste,' she said. 'They respect how it's done in its original language and how it relates to its own cultural values.'
The novelist and translator Thuận, who writes in Vietnamese and French and lives in Paris, had published seven translations of her books in France before any of her fiction made it into English. In 2022, Tilted Axis published her English-language debut, a translation by Nguyễn An Lý of her novel, 'Chinatown,' which unfolds in a single unbroken paragraph and takes place on a stalled Metro in Paris, where a Vietnamese woman gets lost in her past.
Thuận, who was born in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, had long wanted to see her books in English — not only to reach more readers, but to counter stereotypes about Vietnam that persist in Western literature and film.
At an event held by Tilted Axis in London last September to celebrate 'Elevator in Sài Gòn,' Thuận's latest English-language release, a mostly young crowd packed into Libreria, a small bookstore near Brick Lane, occasionally posing questions in Vietnamese.
Speaking through an interpreter, Thuận described how having her work released in English has taken her fiction in new directions, and gave her an idea for her new novel, 'B-52,' she said.
'When I learned that my books would be translated and published by Tilted Axis Press in English, I immediately had the idea for a war novel for Anglophone readers,' she said. 'There's still very little written from the perspective of North Vietnamese on the topic, and I believe the Americans still don't understand the war if they don't understand how North Vietnamese people experienced the war.'
From the start, Tilted Axis stood out for its unconventional taste and willingness to publish quirky, boundary-pushing work.
The press was co-founded in 2015 by the translator Deborah Smith, who made a name for herself when her translation of Han Kang's novel, 'The Vegetarian,' won the International Booker Prize. It was Smith's first full-length translation, and the first English publication of a novel by Han, a Korean novelist who won the Nobel Prize for literature last year.
Its first books included Prabda Yoon's surreal, postmodern short story collection 'The Sad Part Was,' translated from Thai by Mui Poopoksakul, 'Panty,' Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay's erotic novel about a young woman's sexual awakening in Kolkata, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha, and Hwang Jungeun's fantastical novel 'One Hundred Shadows,' about a rundown neighborhood in Seoul whose residents' shadows detach from the ground and rise, translated from Korean by Jung Yewon.
Within a few years of its founding, the press caught the attention of prize committees and foreign publishers. In 2022, Tilted Axis had three of its books on the longlist for the International Booker Prize, and won with Daisy Rockwell's translation of Geetanjali Shree's 'Tomb of Sand,' a formally daring Hindi novel about an elderly woman who won't get out of bed.
Still, surviving as a small press has often been a struggle. To fund its translations, the press, a nonprofit, often relies on grants. The budget is so tight that its eight employees all have other jobs. Even its publisher, Alfaro, who took over when Smith left in 2022, works part-time at a publishing house specializing in art and children's books.
Alfaro hopes the press's fortunes will improve this year with Tilted Axis' expansion into North America, which will give them access to a much larger market.
Until now, Tilted Axis has had to license its translations to American publishers to get its books into the United States, and just nine of its titles were acquired. Now that it can sell directly through American bookstores, Tilted Axis is bringing out a mix of new books and older works that never landed a U.S. publisher.
The first batch of 11 titles arriving this month offers a sampling of the press's stylistic and geographic range, with works like 'Again I Hear These Waters,' a collection featuring poetry by 21 Assamese writers, translated by Shalim M. Hussain; 'I Belong to Nowhere,' a poetry collection by the Dalit feminist activist Kalyani Thakur Charal, translated from Bengali by Mrinmoy Pramanick and Sipra Mukherjee, and Hamid Ismailov's novel 'The Devils' Dance,' translated from Uzbek by Donald Rayfield.
Ismailov, who fled Uzbekistan under threat of arrest in 1992 and settled in Britain, originally published 'The Devils' Dance' in Uzbek on Facebook, chapter by chapter, after finishing it in 2012. A sample translation caught the attention of Tilted Axis, which published it in 2018.
The novel — which interweaves the story of the Uzbek writer Abdulla Qodiriy, who was executed in 1938 during Stalin's purges, and the historical novel that Qodiriy was unable to finish — became the first major literary work from Uzbekistan to be translated into English. Its success led to the translation of several more of his books.
Ismailov credits the press with 'giving voice to the silenced, making the unheard heard, and supporting banished writers from all over the world,' he said in an email.
'To this day, I remain banned in Uzbekistan as a writer, as a name,' Ismailov said. 'Tilted Axis was bold enough to publish my work.'
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