Scottish books head to 13 new languages in first round of translation awards
Thirteen foreign publishers will receive help translating Scottish writing, Publishing Scotland announced on 2 November 2026. The awards are the first round of its 2026/27 Translation Fund, and a second round will be announced before the end of the year.
The list runs from Sri Lanka to Galicia, the Spanish region whose language is Galician. Dedunna in Sri Lanka will translate A Kind of Spark by Elle McNicoll into Sinhalese, the first award in this round toward a Sinhalese edition. Rinoceronte Editora in Spain will put Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet into Galician.
Some titles have more than one buyer. Kapka Kassabova's Elixir has two awards: Armaenia Editorial in Madrid will publish it in Spanish, and ILI-ILI in North Macedonia will publish it in Macedonian. Kate Foster has two books on the list too. Jalsa Publishing House in Lebanon will translate The Maiden into Arabic, and Éditions Phébus/Libella in Paris will translate The Mourning Necklace into French.
Arabic has a second title as well. Diwan Publishing in Cairo will translate How to Kill a Witch by Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell. Czech gets two books. Nakladatelství Bourdon in Prague will publish Jean Findlay's The Bohemian Queen, and Paseka Publishing, also in Prague, will publish Douglas Stuart's John of John. Stuart's novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a major UK fiction award, which is decided by a panel of judges from a longer list of submitted titles.
The German awards go to Verlagsgruppe Droemer Knaur in Munich, which will translate AP Campbell's Donald and his Seven Cows, and W1-Verlage in Hamburg, which will translate Samantha D Miles's Under the Hammer. Meridiaan Uitgevers in Amsterdam will publish Alexander Starritt's Drayton & Mackenzie in Dutch. Editoriale Le Lettere in Ripoli, Italy, will bring Imtiaz Dharker's Shadow Reader into Italian. The first-round list also includes A Kind of Spark, which won a Blue Peter Book Award, a prize for children's books.
The fund is now in its eleventh year. A Publishing Scotland post from June 2026 said that by then it had supported 272 publishers. Publishing Scotland's own figures put the total since its launch in 2015 at 284 Scottish-authored books, translated into about 45 languages. Creative Scotland, the national arts agency, supports the scheme.
The fund is open to publishers outside the United Kingdom. It helps pay the translation fee, so a publisher in Prague or Cairo can take on a book from Scotland without carrying the full cost alone.
That is the practical chain behind the list. A Scottish author writes a novel, a foreign publisher wants it, a translator spends months rendering every sentence, and a reader somewhere opens the result. The fund's job is to make the middle step affordable. The second round will show which books go next.
