Turkish books go to China for first time

ANKARA - Anatolia News Agency

The 19th Beijing International Book Fair that will be held in September will host Turkish literary works for the first time. Hürriyet photo

Turkish literary works will be presented at the 19th Beijing International Book Fair in September for the first time. Chinese audiences will have the opportunity to read books by Tuna Kiremitçi, Can Dündar and Orhan Kemal in their own language.

Speaking about the fair, the Culture and Tourism Ministry’s Libraries and Publications General Director Onur Bilge Kula said Turkey would participate in nine international book fairs this year, and that it would be the first time Turkish books would appear at the fair in Beijing and at Liber in Madrid. The other fairs will take place in Frankfurt, Paris, London, Moscow, Tehran, Abu Dhabi, and Bologna.

“We will go to Abu Dhabi to promote Turkish literature to the Arabic-speaking countries. The Frankfurt Book Fair is the most important one in the world. We will also participate in two fairs for the first time this year, in China and Spain. Because Chinese is spoken by some 1.5 billion people, we need to promote our literature in China. Nine Turkish works have been translated into Chinese so far, and we plan to increase this number. We will also go to the Liber Book Fair, because the Spanish language is not only spoken in Spain. Only seventeen Turkish literary works have been translated into Spanish, and that number is too low.” Kula said that the ministry’s TEDA project, which aims to promote Turkish literature abroad, has been very successful over the past six years. “Turkish literature has been translated into 42 languages and is circulating in 60 countries around the world right now. [Of all foreign languages] the highest number of Turkish books has been translated into German. Russian is also very important to us, because a book translated into Russian can be distributed to all of the Central Asian Turkic republics,” he added.

He said that in order to increase the number of translations, TEDA had organized workshops in the German, English, French, Arabic.