Column | Top books to read in September 2026 for International Translation Day

The first time I encountered a book in translation, I didn’t know that it was, in fact, translated. I didn’t even read it myself, it was read aloud to me by my father. It was a collection of Satyajit Ray’s stories, translated by Gopa Majumdar, and while I had no real understanding that I was listening to stories in a language they had not been written in, I knew there was something different about them. The rhythms were unfamiliar, yet the world seemed somehow both close to mine and entirely new.I think now that this was my first lesson in what translation can do: allow a book to travel across languages without requiring the reader to think about the journey it has made. This month’s reading list, ahead of International Translation Day on September 30, makes that journey especially visible, moving between fiction, autobiography, biography and short stories, originally written in Urdu, Malayalam, Bengali and Assamese. And, it is especially fitting that I return to translation for this, my final column and my last stack of recommendations.‘Wandered the Traveller’ | Nisar Aziz Butt, trs Daisy Rockwell(Harper Perennial India; ₹699)The International Booker-winning translator brings the eminent Pakistani novelist’s work to English more than seven decades after it first appeared in Urdu. At its centre is Afgar, orphaned young, fiercely intelligent and determined to make an intellectual life for herself, even as love and longing keep making appearances. The novel is expansive but also deeply inward, interested as much in Afgar’s restless mind as in what happens to her.‘Wayfarer Woman and the Wayside Lamps’ | Kochattil Kalyanikkutty Amma, trs J. Devika(Zubaan; ₹895)Kochattil Kalyanikkutty Amma was a teacher, traveller and outspoken feminist in early 20th-century Kerala whose work gradually slipped from public memory. At 83, she wrote and self-published her autobiography. In Devika’s translation, the real pleasure lies in the personality on the page, who is curious and opinionated, alert to hypocrisy and entirely unwilling to make herself small.Anita Agnihotri: Selected Stories | Trs Arunava Sinha(Ekada; ₹350)The 12 stories in this collection move between workers and policemen, activists and families. Agnihotri spent more than three decades as a civil servant, but what comes through in her book is not bureaucratic distance but an empathetic, personal eye for the people and worlds she encounters. These stories are observant and unsentimental, and Sinha’s translation preserves that precious directness.‘Ayyankali’ | M.R. Renukumar, trs Catherine Thankamma(Penguin India; ₹399)This biography follows Ayyankali’s long fight against the restrictions governing Dalit life in Travancore, from access to roads and schools to the humiliations imposed on Dalit women. And what’s especially interesting is how the book moves beyond the familiar outline of the reformer and shows how practical and strategic his politics could be. The translation keeps the narrative clear and accessible, and the book reads briskly – informative without feeling weighed down.‘The Wordsmith’ | Dhruba Jyoti Borah(Penguin Eight; ₹599)Moyna of Joharkhat farms by day and steals by night, and Borah’s novel asks what it means to call someone a criminal when caste, poverty and exclusion have shaped much of their life. First published in Assamese as Kotha Ratnakar in 2007, and translated into English by the author himself, the novel has the broad arc of a bildungsroman, but its interest is less in plot than in the making of a man. Borah writes with sympathy, but stops short of romanticising his protagonist. The Assamese original won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2009.(A monthly column on popular fiction.)The writer works in publishing and explores books and literary culture. Published - September 25, 2026 05:30 pm IST