WEBVTT

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It's often said that you can tell
a lot about a person

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by the looking at what's 
on their bookshelves.

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What do my bookshelves
say about me?

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Well, when I asked myself
this question a few years ago,

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I made an alarming discovery.

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I'd always thought of myself 
as a fairly cultured

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cosmopolitan sort of person.


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But my bookshelves told 
a rather different story.

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Pretty much all the titles on them

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were by British or North American authors,

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and there was almost nothing
in translation.

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Discovering this massive, 
cultural blind spot in my reading

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came as quite a shock.

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And when I thought about it,
it seemed like a real shame.

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I knew there had to be
lots of amazing stories out there

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by writers working in languages
other than English.

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And it seemed really sad to think
that my reading habits

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meant I would probably
never encounter them.

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So, I decided to prescribe myself


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an intensive course of global reading.

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2012 was set to be a very 
international year for the UK,

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it was the year of the London Olympics.

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And so I decided to use it
as my timeframe

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to try to read a novel,
short story collection,

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or memoir from every country
in the world.

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And so I did,

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and it was very exciting


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and I learned some remarkable things

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and made some wonderful connections


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that I want to share with you today.

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But it started with some 
practical problems.

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After I worked out which of the many
different lists of countries in the world

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to use for my project,

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I ended up going with the list
of UN-recognized nations,

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to which I added Taiwan,

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which gave me a total of 196 countries.

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And after I'd worked out
how to fit reading and blogging

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about, roughly, four books a week

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around working five days a week,

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I then had to face up to the fact
that I might even not be able

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to get books in English 
from every country.

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Only around 4.5 percent
of the literary works

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published each year in the UK
are translations,

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and the figures are similar for much
of the English-speaking world.

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Although, the proportion
of translated books

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published in many other countries 
is a lot higher.

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4.5 percent is tiny enough
to start with,

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but what that figure doesn't tell you

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is that many of those books

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will come from countries
with strong publishing networks

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and lots of industry professionals
primed to go out and sell those titles

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to English-language publishers.

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So, for example, although
well over 100 books

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are translated from French
and published in the UK each year,

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most of them will come from countries
like France or Switzerland.

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French-speaking Africa, on the other hand,

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will rarely ever get a look in.

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The upshot is that there 
are actually quite a lot of nations

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that may have little or even no

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commercially available literature
in English.

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Their books remain invisible
to readers

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of the world's most published language.

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But when it came to reading the world,

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the biggest challenge of all, for me,

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was that fact that I didn't know
where to start.

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Having spent my life reading
almost exclusively

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British and North American books,

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I had no idea how to go about
sourcing and finding stories

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and choosing them from much
of the rest of the world.

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I couldn't tell you how to
source a story from Swaziland.

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I wouldn't know a good novel
from Namibia.

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There was no hiding it,

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I was a clueless 
literary xenophobe.

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So how on earth was I
going to read the world?

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I was going to have to ask for help.

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So in October 2011, 
I registered my blog

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ayearofreadingtheworld.com,

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and I posted a short appeal online.

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I explained who I was,

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how narrow my reading had been,

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and I asked anyone who cared to

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to leave a message suggesting
what I might read

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from other parts of the planet.

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Now, I had no idea whether
anyone would be interested,

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but within a few hours
of posting my appeal online,

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people started to get in touch.

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At first, it was friends and colleagues.

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Then it was friends of friends.

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And pretty soon, it was strangers.

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Four days after I put that appeal online,

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I got a message from a woman
called Rafidah in Kuala Lumpur.

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She said she loved the sound
of my project,

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could she go to her local
English-language bookshop

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and choose my Malaysian book
and post it to me.

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I accepted enthusiastically

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and a few weeks later,

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a package arrived containing
not one, but two books.

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Rafidah's choice from Malaysia,

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and a book from Singapore
that she had also picked out for me.

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Now, at the time, I was amazed 
that a stranger,

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more than 6,000 miles away,

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would go through to such lengths

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to help someone that she
would probably never meet.

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But Rafidah's kindness proved
to be the pattern for that year.

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Time and again, people went out
of their way to help me.

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Some took on research on my behalf,

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and others made detours 
on holidays and business trips

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to go to bookshops for me.

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It turns out, if you want to 
read the world,

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if you want to encounter it
with an open mind,

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the world will help you.

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When it came to countries with 
little or no

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commercially available 
literature in English,

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people went further still.

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Books often came from surprising sources.

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My Panamanian read, 
for example, came through

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a conversation I had with 
the Panama Canal on Twitter.

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Yes, the Panama Canal
has a Twitter account.

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And when I tweeted at it 
about my project,

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it suggested that I might
want like to try

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to get hold of the work of the 
Panamanian author Juan David Morgan.

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I found Morgan's website
and I sent him a message

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asking if any of his
Spanish-language novels

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had been translated into English.

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And he said that nothing
had been published,

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but he did have an unpublished translation


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of his novel "The Golden Horse".

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He emailed this to me,

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allowing me to become one of
the first people ever

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to have read that book in English.

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Morgan was by no means
the only wordsmith

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to share his work with me
in this way.

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From Sweden to Palau, writers
and translators


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sent me self-published books

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and unpublished manuscripts of books
that hadn't been picked up

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by Anglophone publishers
or that were no longer available,

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giving me privileged glimpses
of some remarkable imaginary worlds.

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I read, for example, about
the Southern African king

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Ngungunhane who led the resistance


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against the Portuguese 
in the 19th century.

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And about marriage rituals
in a remote village

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on the shores of the Caspian sea
in Turkmenistan.

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I met Kuwait's answer to 
"Bridgette Jones".

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And I read about an orgy
in a tree in Angola.

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But perhaps the most amazing example
of the lengths that people

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were prepared to go to
to help me read the world

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came towards the end of my quest

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when I tried to get hold of a book


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from the tiny, Portuguese-speaking 
African island nation

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of Sao Tome and Principe

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Now, having spent several months


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trying everything I could think of

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to find a book that had been translated
into English from the nation,

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it seemed as though the only option 
left to me was to see

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if I could get something
translated for me from scartch.

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I was really dubious about whether
anyone was going to want

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to help me with this and give 
up their time for something like that.

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But, within a week of me putting
a call out on Twitter and Facebook

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for Portuguese speakers,

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I had more people
than I could involve in the project,

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including Margaret Jull Costa,

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a leader in her field
who has translated the work

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of Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago.

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With my nine volunteers in place,

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I managed to find a book by
a Sao Tomean author

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that I could buy enough
copies of online.

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Here 's one of them.

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And I sent a copy out to each
of my volunteers.

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They all took on a couple of
short stories from this collection,

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stuck to their word, sent
their translations back to me,

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and within six weeks,
I had the entire book to read.

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In that case, as I found so often
during my year of reading the world,

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my not knowing and being open
about my limitations

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had become a big opportunity.

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When it came to Sao Tome and Principe,

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it was a chance not only
to learn something new

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and discover a new collection of stories,

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but also to bring together
a group of people

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and facilitate a joint
creative endevour.

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My weakness had become
the project's strength.

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The books I read that year
opened my eyes to many things.

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As those who enjoy reading will know,

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books have an extraordinary power
to take you out of yourself

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and into someone else's mindset,

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so that, for a while at least,

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you look at the world through 
different eyes.

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That can be an uncomfortable experience,

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particularly if you're reading a book
from a culture

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that may have quite different values
to your own.

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But it can also be really enlightening.

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Wrestling with unfamiliar ideas
can help clarify your own thinking.

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And it can also show up blind spots
in the way

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you might have been looking at the world.

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When I looked back at much
of the English-language literature

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I'd grown up with, for example,

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I began to see how narrow
a lot of it was

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compared to the richness 
that the world has to offer.

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And, as the pages turned,

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something else started
to happen, too.

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Little by little, 
that long list of countires

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that I'd started the year with


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changed from a rather dry, academic
register of place names

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into living, breathing entities.

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Now, I don't want to suggest
that it's at all possible

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to get rounded picture of a country
simply by reading one book.

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But cumulatively, the stories
I read that year

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made me more alive
than ever before

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to the richness, diversity and complexity
of our remarkable planet.

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It was as though the world's stories
and the people who'd gone

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to such lengths to help me 
read them

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had made it real to me.

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These days, when I look
at my bookshelves

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or consider the works on my E-reader,

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they tell a rather different story.

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It's the story of the power books have
to connect us

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across political, geographical, cultural,
social, religious divides.

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It's the tale of the potential
human beings have

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to work together.

NOTE Paragraph

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And, it's testament to the
extraordinary times we lives in,

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where, thanks to the Internet,
it's easier than ever before

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for a stranger to share a story,
a worldview, a book

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with someone she may never meet
on the other side of the planet.

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I hope it's a story I'm reading
for many years to come.

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And I hope many more people
will join me.

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If we all read more widely,
there'd be more incentive

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for publishers to translate more books,

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and we'd all be richer for that.

NOTE Paragraph

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Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Applause)