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Wonderful list.

Thanks Aubrey! And thank you everyone who's been voting and adding such awesome books - there's so much I want to add to my reading list!

Voted for the 7 I've read; but I want to read them all!

Paul wrote: "Voted for the 7 I've read; but I want to read them all!"

Personally I think it's fine to vote for books you've just heard a lot of great things about as well - but yes the list it becoming more and more inspiring.

Great list. I'm pleased at how many are on my tbr or wishlist and I added 4 though I only see 2 of them. Maybe the others were already there?!

Thanks for adding me, Aubrey. I've got some work to do.

Leajk, this is an awesome list:)

Rowena wrote: "Leajk, this is an awesome list:)"

Thanks Rowena, you're so sweet!

Leajk wrote: "Rowena wrote: "Leajk, this is an awesome list:)"

Thanks Rowena, you're so sweet!"

Thank you for compiling an excellent list! I was thinking of doing something like this for my blog when someone directed me to this list. So many writers I'd never heard of before, how exciting:)

Inspiring!

How awful, I've only read one of these books by women authors! Note to self!!

So this is a cool thing that's happening:

Women in Translation Month August 2014 - http://biblibio.blogspot.com/2014/05/...

GR group Loosed in Translation has a thread for it here:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

It says "A list about female fiction authors from non-English speaking countries.". Well, that's easy :-), as both the Netherlands and Flemish speaking Belgium have some great women authors who write in Dutch, and several of them have been translated.
But then it says "Please add the country the book is from in your vote so that others can check it out!". Why would one need to add the country the book is from? It is easy enough to just click on the author's name to see where she was born.

Apart from that, present day Indonesia used to be a Dutch colony, which means quite a number of Dutch authors were born there but moved to the Netherlands when Indonesia became independent, or when they reached the age for boarding school, when their parents moved back to the Netherlands and obviously took all of their family with them, and so on and so forth. Although these authors were born in Indonesia, they are considered Dutch, like for instance Hella S. Haasse. Several authors from, nowadays independent, Surinam moved to the Netherlands as well, like for instance Astrid Roemer (who went back and forth a number of times, by the way). And the same goes for authors from the Netherlands Antilles. In these cases you can't really say they are 'from a country' and have 'emigrated' later, can you? In short, it is not always clear where a book comes from... or it would mean that Hella S. Haasse's books are from Indonesia, just because the author was born there? I don't think so... I'm confused, as one can tell :-).

There is, by the way, a Listopia of English translations of Dutch Literature (and there are plenty of women on there).

Hi there Booklovinglady! The point of me adding "Please add the country the book is from in your vote so that others can check it out!" was so that if you checked out anyone's individual votes you could get an overview of the countries on their list and only click on the ones you were interested in (rather than clicking on each and every one looking for a specific country). Ideally there would be a way to add this on the main list so that one could look there at once, but alas that's not how Goodreads works.

However it is not at all necessary to add a country, perhaps I will add a "feel free to...".

Regarding the definition of exactly what makes a 'country of origin' I'd say that in most cases that doesn't include a English speaking country it doesn't really matter, I think immigrant/emigrant literature certainly belongs to this list as well.

When I wrote that I was specifically thinking about authors such as Kim Thúy or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who have moved from their him countries to countries where English is dominating (although Thúy writes in French) and I felt I wanted to include them.

Overall from what I can see people adding to the lists I think the general spirit of the list is being upheld!

Ireland should be excluded too, technically it does have two official languages, Irish and English, but the vast majority of people are native English speakers.

Yes, obviously, don't know why I forgot about Ireland!

@Leajk
The Color Purple (#396), You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (#410), Paradise (#429), Song of Solomon (#444) and Beloved (#457) are by US authors Alice Walker and Toni Morrison respectively....

Canada is officially bilingual, as far as I know, so maybe an exception should be made for French speaking Canada? (Gabrielle Roy is already on the list, I noticed). It's a thin line anyway, as it also mentioned New Zealand after the 'No books from', thus excluding, for instance, Maori author Patricia Grace...

Can't be easy to think of a fitting description, I admit :-)

Yeah, I haven't been keeping track of this list lately. I'll look at those books and remove when needed.

Yes, I'd say the rule is that the language should be written by someone who either doesn't have English as their first language or not in English originally.

Leajk wrote: "Yeah, I haven't been keeping track of this list lately. I'll look at those books and remove when needed..."

I don't envy you your job :-) I also noticed Out of Africa (#7) but as I've read the book, I know for sure it's an autobiography, not fiction, so that one shouldn't be on the list either, I'd say...

Leajk wrote: "Yes, obviously, don't know why I forgot about Ireland!"

Haha, you're grand, thanks for adding us in. =D I really like the idea of this list, by the way. =)

Leajk wrote: "Yeah, I haven't been keeping track of this list lately. I'll look at those books and remove when needed.

Yes, I'd say the rule is that the language should be written by someone who either doesn't ..."

Yes I've been on the fence on Out of Africa, obviously it's Karen Blixen's most famous work, and she is Danish, BUT it is originally in English and a autobiography as you point out. Similarly The Second Sex (#1) is non-fiction... But I've decided to be lenient on other than glaring errors (i.e. English best-sellers that crowd any other list). Less work ;)