Very off topic, but I’ve actually often wondered why there don’t seem to be any non-native speakers writing commercial fiction in English, given how massively larger the English-speaking market is compared to that of a lot of the smaller European languages. Nabokov is literally the only example I can think of.
Well, fiction writing generally isn’t the sort of thing one enters into for the wonderful market. You do it because you love it and are somehow good enough at it that it can pay the bills. Probably you write your first novel in your spare time with very low expectations of it ever being published.
So why write in anything but your favorite language? And while, proficiency-wise, people like Nabokov and Conrad exist, chances are that you aren’t one of them. (That said, there are probably more non-native writers of note than you think. How many of my favorite authors have red hair? I have no idea.)
Thing is, I read almost no fiction in Finnish and quite a lot in English. There isn’t much of a tradition of speculative fiction in Finnish that isn’t just copying stuff already done in English. So if I were to write a SF or a fantasy story, I’d seriously consider whether I could do it in English, because for me those kinds of stories are written in English and then maybe poorly translated into Finnish.
I’m sure few people match up to Nabokov or Conrad (whose non-nativeness I didn’t know about), but I find it odd that I don’t know of any contemporary writers who are even trying to write in English without being native speakers. I’m sure there are ones I don’t know about, so any examples of currently active published non-native English fiction writers are welcome.
An opportunity for what? Genre literature is already translated into Finnish, and the publishers with something that isn’t Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings are mostly able to stick around, but probably aren’t making big profits. Finnish-written SF or fantasy is mostly crap and sinks without a trace. A good indication of the general level of quality is that for the first 20 years of the Atorox prize for the best Finnish SF short story, two outlier authors won ten of the 20 awards. No one has even been able to earn a full-time living writing SF in Finnish, not to mention growing rich.
Of course there’s nothing preventing someone from writing stuff on par with Ted Chiang and Jeff VanderMeer in Finnish, but why bother? The book could be a cult classic but probably not a mainstream hit, and there aren’t enough non-mainstream Finnish-speaking buyers for a book to earn someone a living.
I don’t even know who buys all the translated Finnish SF books. I’ve read a bunch of those from the library, but almost all of the books I’ve bought have been in English. Why bother with translations that are both more expensive than the original paperbacks and have clunkier language?
Very off topic, but I’ve actually often wondered why there don’t seem to be any non-native speakers writing commercial fiction in English, given how massively larger the English-speaking market is compared to that of a lot of the smaller European languages. Nabokov is literally the only example I can think of.
Well, fiction writing generally isn’t the sort of thing one enters into for the wonderful market. You do it because you love it and are somehow good enough at it that it can pay the bills. Probably you write your first novel in your spare time with very low expectations of it ever being published.
So why write in anything but your favorite language? And while, proficiency-wise, people like Nabokov and Conrad exist, chances are that you aren’t one of them. (That said, there are probably more non-native writers of note than you think. How many of my favorite authors have red hair? I have no idea.)
Thing is, I read almost no fiction in Finnish and quite a lot in English. There isn’t much of a tradition of speculative fiction in Finnish that isn’t just copying stuff already done in English. So if I were to write a SF or a fantasy story, I’d seriously consider whether I could do it in English, because for me those kinds of stories are written in English and then maybe poorly translated into Finnish.
I’m sure few people match up to Nabokov or Conrad (whose non-nativeness I didn’t know about), but I find it odd that I don’t know of any contemporary writers who are even trying to write in English without being native speakers. I’m sure there are ones I don’t know about, so any examples of currently active published non-native English fiction writers are welcome.
Sounds like an opportunity! I wonder if it would be more valuable to translate (with the royalties that implies) or to just rip off?
An opportunity for what? Genre literature is already translated into Finnish, and the publishers with something that isn’t Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings are mostly able to stick around, but probably aren’t making big profits. Finnish-written SF or fantasy is mostly crap and sinks without a trace. A good indication of the general level of quality is that for the first 20 years of the Atorox prize for the best Finnish SF short story, two outlier authors won ten of the 20 awards. No one has even been able to earn a full-time living writing SF in Finnish, not to mention growing rich.
Of course there’s nothing preventing someone from writing stuff on par with Ted Chiang and Jeff VanderMeer in Finnish, but why bother? The book could be a cult classic but probably not a mainstream hit, and there aren’t enough non-mainstream Finnish-speaking buyers for a book to earn someone a living.
I don’t even know who buys all the translated Finnish SF books. I’ve read a bunch of those from the library, but almost all of the books I’ve bought have been in English. Why bother with translations that are both more expensive than the original paperbacks and have clunkier language?