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Over at Wired, Bruce Sterling has run a press release from leading Finnish magazine editor, Toni Jerrman, about the fine Finnish science fiction available in English at the moment. We contacted Toni and asked for information about translations.

Hannu Rajaniemi is a very clever guy. There’s no mention of a translator for “Elegy for a Young Elk” so he probably did it himself, but the English publication is, we believe, new this year. We suspect that The Quantum Thief was written directly in English.

Johanna Sinisalo’s story, ”Bear’s Bride”, was translated by Liisa Rantalaiho.

Tiina Raevaara “My creator, my creation” was translated by Hildi Hawkins & Soila Lehtonen.

J. Pekka Mäkelä’s ”Thirty More Years” was translated by Owen F. Witesman.

We believe that all of these stories are eligible for our awards. (The Mäkelä was translated in 2009, but apparently not published until this year.)

One of the first translated works of 2011 will be a novella by Spanish writer, Domingo Santos. “The First Day of Eternity” will appear in the Jan/Feb 2011 issue of Analog, and will be translated by the editor, Stanley Schmidt, himself. World SF News has more details.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón is one of the most successful Spanish writers ever. His The Shadow of the Wind is second only to Don Quixote in sales of Spanish fiction. Last month his YA fantasy novel, The Prince of the Mist, was made available in English, translated by Lucia Graves. (It is actually his first novel, but it has only just been translated.) Ruiz Zafón knows his fantasy well, as evidenced by this article for The Guardian.

Niall Harrison of Torque Control writes to let us know about Living Souls, a novel by Dmitry Bykov (translated by Cathy Porter). The book appears to be a political satire and in set in Russia a few decades in the future after a civil war. Here’s an extract from the blurb:

In a world a few decades from now, Russia has lost its influence and descended into a farcical civil war. With an extreme right-wing cult in power, racial tensions have divided the country into the Varangians – those who consider themselves to be the original Aryan settlers of Russia – and the Khazars, the liberals and Jews driven out of Moscow by recent events. Morale has reached an all-time low as the brutality and pointlessness of the situation is becoming more and more apparent: what is left of the fighting now revolves around capturing and recapturing Degunino, a seemingly magical village with an abundance of pies, vodka and accommodating womenfolk.

The Times has a review here.

At Three Percent Chad W. Post has been talking about the Japanese Literature Publishing Project. This is an initiative of the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs aimed at bringing Japanese writers to the attention of the rest of the world. Post lists a number of newly translated books, several of which are of interest to us.

Punk Samurai and the Cult (Panku samurai kirarete soro) by Ko Machida is described as a fantasy.

Colorful (Karafuru) by Eto Mori is described as a juvenile fantasy.

It isn’t clear whether Ghosts and Lower-class Samurai and Other Stories (Yukensho) by Hideyuki Kikuchi is fantastical or not, but some of Kikuchi’s novels are the basis of the highly successful manga and anime series, Vampire Hunter D.

Here’s a translated novel that doesn’t appear to actually be science fiction, but may well appeal to science fiction readers. Dark Matter by Germany’s Juli Zeh is a mystery novel, but the characters in the novel are physicists, and according to this review of the English translation Zeh uses this as an excuse to play with issues such as causality and the nature of time.