One of the things I value most about my job is the possibility of meeting people passionate about books from all over the world. At the Turin Book Fair last week I encountered Hungarians and Egyptians as well as of course many Italians. Today, back in the office, I had a meeting with a Russian agent who lives in Barcelona. Yulia Dobrovolskaya is one of the partners in the Elkost literary agency (www.elkost.com). Started by Umberto Eco’s Russian translator Elena Kostioukovitch, Elkost has offices in Milan, Barcelona and Moscow and is on a mission to get Russian literature more widely read in the rest of the world. Yulia talked fascinatingly about how (and why) not very many Russian writers have been published in Spain. Every book she told me about I wanted to read. They ranged from a forgotten classic, Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and his Disciples, to the novels of Ilya Mitrofanov, a writer killed tragically at the age of 46, who was apparently one of Russia’s most promising literary talents, and, finally, a remarkable contemporary novel about adolescence, reminiscent of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies: Miriam Petrosyan’s The House That … Of course, although we will consider these books carefully, it’s unlikely that, even if we wanted to, we could publish all of them …

Our list is simply too small and the world of possible books too big. That doesn’t mean we should stop looking at things though. At a seminar on ‘Getting More Italian Books Published in the United States’, which took place at the Turin Book Fair, one Italian agent took a very pessimistic view of the fact that so few Italian books find their way into English (far fewer than Japanese books for example). He thought it wasn’t worth even submitting Italian books to English-language publishers because the time involved reaped such little reward. Better, he said, to concentrate on selling rights in Europe. How sad it would be for English-language publishers if Italian books stopped landing on our desks. Particularly since there is definitely a readership for them out there, as has been demonstrated by the enterprising Italian publisher Edizioni E/O. Tired of waiting for American publishers to translate books, the Rome-based E/O took matters into its own hands and, in 2005, started publishing directly into the American market as Europa Editions (www.europaeditions.com). They had a huge bestseller with the French novelist Muriel Barbary’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, but other books in translation have been doing extremely well for them too. Russians in Barcelona, Romans in New York: the more people mix, the more books will eventually find their way into the English language.