Hi, Happy Easter to those celebrating it. Today, I’m Stuart, the host for the next month here at Global Literature in Libraries Initiative. I have blogged at my own blog Winstonsdad . My blog was initially named after my sadly long-passed-away dog, Winston. He is still my avatar in most places. Hence, I choose to put my own face here. I started winstonsdad in June 2009. The initial idea was that, in the few years before, I had been reading more and more books in translation and had met a number of other bloggers via Twitter. I decided to start my blog. The initial idea in the first year I came up with was ‘around the world in 52 books.’ I had set a challenge to read a book from 52 countries and had a title for this idea that was a nod to Jules Verne’s Around the world in 80 days. I completed that task but along the way, I found I was more and more drawn to voices in translation. So since then, the blog has had a very strong focus on fiction in translation, mainly literature, but also crime, some non-fiction works, and classics over the years. I have always felt that translated fiction is often viewed as high-brow and my quest is to show that a lot is easily accessible and opens windows to different cultures. It can often explain what is going on in the world or what happened. I often think of reading Ivo Andric’s book, The Bridge on the Drina, which described the Balkan conflict as it showed how the wounds that led to that conflict were deep. I also love collections from the likes of Comma Press. Over the last five or so years, they have brought books out for a series called Reading the City. The Book of Prague and The Book of Bejing are next on my TBR from them, where they get a current writer and some older writers to paint a picture of a city.

I long ago started a hashtag on Twitter (or X as it is now). I started the hashtag #translationthurs. This came around as there was a hashtag #Fridayreads, which was very popular, but the books in translation just seemed to get caught up in the wave of what everyone was reading. I started that hashtag in July 2010, and it has had tweets most weeks for the last 14 years, making a traceable history of books in translation for the past 14 years. As a reader myself, I view the way I read as being a small boat in the sea of the world of books, and apart from a few times a year, one book to the next, my boat stops all around the world.

As for me, I work for the NHS, the National Health Service here in the UK. I am a support worker for a team that works to stop people with learning disabilities from getting admitted to wards or the placement (where they live). We have Nurses, Occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, and psychologists. We do intensive work with the patient and their staff teams to help people stay at home. It is an exciting job that can be different every day. I am married and live on the edge of the Peak District. I have dyspraxia, so my posts may be hard to follow. Sometimes, they have improved with the likes of Grammarly. But I am very disorganized. I hope to bring you as much as I can this month. We can use the hashtag #translationthurs and chat about books in translation from kids through middle grade, YA, and fiction, which is what I mostly read. In my next post, I will talk about shadow juries for book prizes and the Nobel Prize.