The French edition of A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth will be published on 13 March, and is available for pre-order.
An anonymous well-wisher has sent me a picture of my book translated into Bengali. I had no idea that the book was being translated into Bengali -- and neither it seems did my publisher, so this is a pirated edition. Perhaps there are other editions out there I didn't know about, in addition to the twenty-five officially licensed versions? It would be wonderful to have an officially sanctioned version in Bengali as well as the many other languages spoken in the Indian Subcontinent (Hindi, Maratha, Gujarati, Punjabi, Urdu, Telugu, Tamil, Sinhala, and so on) and I'd very much like to see translations into Hebrew and Arabic. My father yearns for an edition in Yiddish, whereas I would like to see one in Sindarin, which I think would look prettier. However, the translation-rights manager says that there are no plans to issue one in the language of Mordor, which (she said), she 'would not utter here'.
