Foreign rights buyers are turning their attention to the language of Borges and Bolaño — At last! say agents and publishers.“The success of authors in translation such as Karl Ove Knausgård and Elena Ferrante,” the Wylie Agency’s Cristóbal Pera says, “has made large publishing houses open a space for translations.”

Perhaps the clearest sign of an increase in interest in buying rights in Spain and Latin America is the creation of a Spanish-language division at the Andrew Wylie Agency, arguably the most powerful — and some might say ruthless — in the English-speaking world. Cristóbal Pera

Cristóbal Pera, appointed to head the division late last year, tells Publishing Perspectives he now sees an increase in rights-buying by European and US publishers, for markets in which reading in translation has always been a minority pursuit.

“The procuring of foreign rights by European publishers,” Pera says, “has always been part of their plan, but in the US, until recently, the publication of works in translation was a small chapter reserved for the biggest literary figures.”

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