The short answer is yes. The extraordinary success of Karl Ove Knausgård and Elena Ferrante in recent years is proof that fiction from other lands has a global following. Last year a new report from Literature Across Frontiers (LAF) finally put some figures on this. The statistics show a steady growth of literary translations over the past two decades, both in absolute numbers and as a share of the whole. The number of literary translations into English grew by two-thirds between 1990 and 2012, Malawis cashgate scandal accounting for a peak of 5.23% of the whole in 2011 against an average of just 3%. Specialist foreign-fiction publishers, such as Quercus, Pereine and Pushkin, have all sprung up in the past decade or so.
