Facts and Figures

Below you will find a graphical overview of the most frequently translated authors and titles from Dutch into French, and of the most important publishers and translators for the period 2000-today. By clicking the menu on the right side of the page you can go directly to the desired graph.

This graph shows the number of titles translated from Dutch into French since 2000. Using the cursor under the graph, you can indicate which period you wish to see. The large peak in 2003 is due to the fact that the Netherlands were the special guest of the Salon du Livre in Paris that year, an event that was accompanied by a major publicity campaign by the literary funds. The smaller peak in 2019 is more difficult to explain. It is probably the result of several factors: in 2018 Dutch literature was the focus of the Leipzig Book Fair, from 2018-2020 the Literary Fund promoted Dutch literature in France through the Phares du Nord campaign, and in 2019 the Netherlands were the invited country at the Marché de la Poésie in Paris.

Pieter Aspe is a Flemish detective author. Publisher Albin Michel published 19 of his novels between 2008 and 2021. Guido van Genechten is a Flemish children's book author, who has enjoyed international success, particularly with his books about a little white fish. Thierry Robberechts is an author of comics and children's books from Brussels who writes in French and in Dutch. Liesbet Slegers is also a writer/illustrator of children’s books. This graph shows us how Dutch authors have recently been successful in very different genres : from children’s books to « highbrow » literature through more popular genres like detectives.

La fée sorcière by Flemish author Brigitte Minne is the only children's book in this chart.
Le champ de fraises is a novel by Renate Dorrestein that was published in three consecutive years by three different publishers, one of whch was a book club. Almost the same goes for La maison des sept soeurs by Elle Eggers and Petits meurtres entre voisins by Saskia Noort. Le secret by Anna Enquist was first published twice by Actes Sud, and then in a pocket series by another editor. Carl Friedman’s Mon père couleur de nuit has also had both a classic and a pocket edition.
These books are all written by women, but it seems a bit premature to draw conclusions from this on the basis of five titles.

The Belgian publishing house Mijade, which is in second place, publishes many books by Thierry Robberecht and Liesbet Slegers, two of the most-translated authors of children’s books. Milan is also a publisher of children's and youth literature.
Gallimard, like Actes Sud, is relatively open to translated literature, and for a number of years employed an editor with a special interest in Dutch literature, which is reflected in the graph. To a lesser extent, this is true for Seuil as well.
Unsurprisingly then, we see publishing houses with a lot of space for translated literature in their collections on the one hand, and on the other, publishers of children's literature, a genre that does well in France, as we have seen. With the exception of Mijade, these are all French publishers. Of course, this does not mean that there is no interest in publishing Dutch-language literature in French-speaking Belgium. However, Belgian publishers are less well represented in France than French publishers and their domestic market is obviously smaller.