A new festival of translated literature is being launched in Bristol next week amid a sales boom in translated fiction in the UK.

Translated By, Bristol is the brainchild of Polly Barton, author and translator of the award-winning Butter by Asako Yuzuki, and Tom Robinson, owner of Gloucester Road Books, which is organising the festival alongside Barton and another independent Bristol bookshop, Storysmith.

“Translated fiction becoming more popular in recent years has not necessarily led to a greater appreciation for the work of translators, or much consideration of the act of translation itself,” says Robinson. “We wanted to think about whether there was something we could do that would address both of these concerns.”

The festival, which runs 12-25 May, will feature a conversation between five translators shortlisted for the International Booker prize and a “translation duel” – in which translators debate their translations of a text in front of an audience – among other events.

UK readers continue to have strong appetites for translated fiction, with Butter selling almost 250,000 copies in the UK last year. Social media buzz around particular titles has helped shift copies: Ros Schwartz’s translation of Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, a favourite on “BookTok”, sold 45,000 copies last year, an elevenfold rise on 2022 sales.

Festival organisers were aware of increased interest in translated literature from readers, meaning they felt the festival “would have a breadth of appeal it might not have done, say, five years ago”, says Barton.

A central reason for the recent success of translated literature is the work of independent publishers such as Fitzcarraldo, Peirene and Comma, say the organisers. Those presses “tend to be more willing to take risks”, adds Robinson.

One of the key aims of the festival is to showcase a “breadth of languages and geographies, beyond the major languages and locations of Europe, which tend to occupy so much focus”, says Robinson.

The programme features an event on translating the work of the Cameroonian poet Jean-Claude Awono and another with Hassan Blasim, who writes in Arabic, along with his translator Jonathan Wright. The festival will also host a conversation between two prominent translators of Latin American literature, Frank Wynne and Annie McDermott.

“We also have events featuring European languages that aren’t the five or so that get the most attention,” says Barton, with conversations about books translated from Slovakian (This Room Is Impossible to Eat by Nicol Hochholczerová, translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood) and Danish (Iron Lung by Kirstine Reffstrup, translated by Hunter Simpson).

Barton sees this approach of “actively looking beyond our immediate borders” as helping to “resist the political currents promoting xenophobia, prejudice and cultural homogeneity”.

The festival will also see Max Porter talking to two of his translators, Saskia van der Lingen (Dutch) and Charles Recoursé (French). It will close with the translation duel, featuring Adriana Hunter and Wynne. “The language of the slam this year is French, and we’re distributing the text to people in advance, so there’s the opportunity for people with a little French knowledge to have a go themselves if they like,” says Robinson.

Duels are an “excellent way of opening up the process for people and allowing them to get a sense of how creative translation really is”, adds Barton.

Slovakia’s populist government has announced plans to drastically raise value-added tax (VAT) on books to help fix its public finances, drawing condemnation not only from booksellers and publishers but also far-right, pro-Russian propaganda groups seeking to circulate their ideas in print.

Announcing the new VAT rate this week, Slovakia’s finance minister, Ladislav Kamenický, claimed studies had shown that books were “primarily purchased by wealthier segments of the population” and could therefore be taxed at the new basic rate of 23% rather than the current rate of 10%.

The step is part of a general increase of the basic VAT rate announced by the coalition government headed by Robert Fico, aimed at addressing Slovakia’s excessive public deficit by raising €50m (£42m) in 2025. Under the proposal, basic food, medicine and textbooks would be exempt from the VAT rise or taxed at a lower rate than before.

The rate rises comes amid an increasingly aggressive stance by Fico’s government towards the culture sector, brought into the open by its dismissal last month of the directors of the country’s national gallery and national theatre.

If the tax changes get passed by parliament and come into effect in January, it would make Slovakia one of only two countries in Europe not to have reduced VAT rates for books – a measure whose intangible positive effects on the economy, education and democracy are mostly agreed to outweigh financial benefits.

Kamenický’s comments about the supposed affluence of bibliophiles have been greeted with derision in the central European country. On social media, Slovaks posted videos of themselves admiring the newly recognised financial assets on their bookshelves, to a soundtrack of Abba’s Money, Money, Money.

Juraj Heger, the chair of Slovakia’s Association of Publishers and Booksellers, questioned the finance minister’s claim that books were mostly bought by the well-off, saying recent surveys had shown only a marginal difference between the book-buying habits of high- and medium-income earners.

Higher VAT would also not help poorer book-buyers, he added, since it would probably result in higher book prices and mostly affect already struggling booksellers.

“People are very angry,” Heger told the Guardian. “The ministry of culture is destroying everything that has been built up over decades.”

“The book market in Slovakia is very small, making about €100m a year”, he added. “This decision will lead to people buying fewer books, so the government will only be able to raise very little money from this.”

Until now, Denmark has been a European outlier by levying books with as much as 25% of VAT, though the Scandinavian country compensates for the additional burden with promotional support and grant schemes for publishers.

All other countries in the EU make use of legislation that allows them to apply reduced VAT rates to book publishing. The average VAT on books in the EU is about 6%, and in some European countries – including the UK, Ireland, Norway and Slovakia’s neighbour, the Czech Republic – books are zero-rated for VAT purposes.

Latvia raised its VAT rate for books from 5% to the 21% standard rate at the start of 2009 but reversed the measure only eight months later, after lay-offs at publishing houses and a sharp decrease in sales.

Fico’s government has set a target of reducing Slovakia’s deficit from an estimated 6% to 4.7% of GDP next year. “Consolidation is, as the English say, ‘a must’,” the prime minister said on Tuesday.

The tax plans have earned Fico, an admirer of Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s illiberal leader, Viktor Orbán, criticism from the far right.

Roman Michelko, of the far-right Slovak National party (SNS), who chairs the parliament’s culture and media committee, compared the planned higher VAT on books to the policies of communist era Czechoslovakia.

The director of Torden, a publishing house specialising in anti-western, pro-Russian and conspiracy theory books, said the policy had revealed the “wretchedness and shallowness of the thinking of our government”.

Robert Merva, whose catalogue contains titles such as Putin’s Pilgrimage, Democracy is Total Nonsense and A Brief History of (Almost) Everything Paranormal, suggested the tax plan meant Fico’s nationalist government was in fact working “in the service of foreign interests”.