Norway Funded 529 Translations in One Year. Lithuania Has Funded 650 in Twenty-Five.

Here are two numbers.

In 2024, NORLA — Norwegian Literature Abroad — awarded 529 translation grants into 47 languages, at a cost of roughly €850,000. Twenty of those grants were for translations into English.

The Lithuanian Culture Institute has funded approximately 650 translations in twenty-five years, on a budget of about €100,000 a year. In its January 2025 round it supported twenty-five books into nineteen languages. Exactly one was into English: Tomas Venclova's The Grove of the Eumenides, published by Bloodaxe.

Norway funds in a year what Lithuania funds in a quarter-century. That is the story. Everything else is commentary.

How Scandinavia got there

It did not start with money. It started with ten novels.

Between 1965 and 1975, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö wrote the ten Martin Beck books — a deliberately finite sequence, conceived as a single work in ten parts, using police procedure as a vehicle for a critique of Swedish social democracy. They invented the form that everything after them would inherit.

Henning Mankell picked it up. Faceless Killers appeared in 1991 and introduced Kurt Wallander, who would carry more than forty novels and sell in the region of forty million copies before Mankell's death on 5 October 2015. Mankell put Wallander on Mariagatan in Ystad, a real street in a real town of about twenty thousand people on Sweden's southern coast, and in doing so turned it into a pilgrimage site.

Then came the accident that made it an industry. Stieg Larsson died on 9 November 2004, before any of his novels were published. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo appeared in Swedish in August 2005, in the United Kingdom in January 2008, and in the United States in September 2008. It was translated by Steven T. Murray, who published under the pseudonym Reg Keeland — a detail worth pausing on, because a translator using a false name to make a Swedish book feel less foreign is a fairly precise summary of the anglophone market's anxieties at the time.

Those anxieties did not survive the sales figures. What Larsson proved was that a translated novel could be a mass-market event. Publishers who had treated translation as a prestige loss-leader started treating it as a category.

The three percent problem

The benchmark everyone still cites comes from Three Percent, a project launched at the University of Rochester in 2007. Its premise, and its name, came from an estimate that about three per cent of books published in the United States are translations — and that the figure for literary fiction and poetry specifically is closer to 0.7 per cent.

Two caveats matter. The estimate is old and was never formally updated. And the Translation Database that grew out of the project is now hosted by Publishers Weekly, which has changed how the data is gathered. The three per cent figure is best treated as a durable order-of-magnitude claim rather than a current measurement.

Britain does somewhat better — translated fiction runs at roughly four per cent of titles, and sold around 1.9 million units in 2022. But the composition of that four per cent has shifted decisively. Of the thirty biggest-selling translated titles in the UK in 2022, fourteen were translations from Japanese. The market opened; it simply opened toward a different part of the world.

What the Baltic institutes are working with

Latvia reports 83 works published in 33 countries in the year to March 2026, 53 of them supported by Latvian Literature grants. That is a respectable output for a country of 1.8 million and represents real growth.

Estonia's own figures are harder to pin down; a widely repeated estimate of 40 to 50 titles a year traces back to a 2014 source and should be read with that in mind. Support runs through Traducta, administered by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia. Estonian institutions are consistent about naming the primary obstacle, and it is not money and not interest: it is the small number of people in the world who can translate literary Estonian into literary English.

That constraint compounds. A translator is made by having translated; a translator who cannot get commissions does not become the translator who could have handled the next book. Norway's 529 grants are not only buying 529 books. They are maintaining a working population of literary translators in 47 languages. Lithuania's €100,000 a year cannot do that, and no amount of enthusiasm substitutes for it.

Three writers who complicate the picture

It is tempting to reach for the Baltic writers who have broken through and treat them as counter-evidence. They are not, and the reasons are instructive.

Sofi Oksanen writes in Finnish. Purge is set largely in Estonia and deals directly with Estonian history, but it is Finnish literature in translation, funded and promoted as such.

Rūta Šepetys, whose Between Shades of Gray introduced the June deportations to a generation of North American teenagers, is American and writes in English. The best-known “Lithuanian” novelist in English never needed a translator at all.

Grigory Kanovich, the great chronicler of Lithuanian Jewish life, is Lithuanian and wrote in Russian — which places him outside both the Lithuanian-to-English pipeline and most readers' mental map of the region.

None of these facts diminishes any of the three writers. They simply mean that the apparent visibility of Baltic literature in English is being carried, to a surprising degree, by books that did not travel through the translation system at all.

The showcases, correctly labelled

The Baltic states were Market Focus at the London Book Fair in 2018 — a genuine and well-used platform, and frequently misdescribed as a Frankfurt guest-of-honour appearance. Only Lithuania has held that Frankfurt slot, in 2002. Estonia was guest of honour at the Bologna Children's Book Fair in 2025.

The distinction matters because the platforms do different work. Frankfurt sells rights; London Market Focus builds relationships; Bologna reaches an editorial community that buys internationally as a matter of course. Estonia's Bologna appearance may prove the most consequential of the three, and it is the one that received the least coverage.

The American presses that carried this

For thirty years, the English-language availability of Central and Eastern European literature rested on a handful of small houses. Northwestern University Press ran Writings from an Unbound Europe, which published sixty-one books before being discontinued around 2011 and 2012. Dalkey Archive did comparable work. Open Letter Books at Rochester — the press behind Three Percent — has since joined forces with Deep Vellum.

That consolidation is not a scandal; small presses survive by merging. But it is worth naming what it means. The number of independent English-language editorial desks actively looking for a Latvian novel is smaller now than it was fifteen years ago, at exactly the moment the Baltic institutes are finally in a position to fund one.

What would actually change this

Not a manifesto and not a festival. Three unglamorous things: sustained translator training with guaranteed commissions attached; multi-year rather than annual funding, so that a publisher can plan a list; and a willingness to fund the second and third books by the same author, which is where readerships are actually built.

Scandinavia did not become readable in English because it wrote better books. It became readable because Sjöwall and Wahlöö created a form, Mankell industrialised it, Larsson proved the ceiling was higher than anyone thought, and then — crucially — the funding bodies were already there, at scale, to catch the wave.

The Baltic institutes are doing careful, serious work on roughly an eighth of the budget. The gap in the numbers is not a gap in ambition. It is a gap in arithmetic.