Transnational Indie Speculative Project

ongoing

Speculative genre fiction (SGF) - crime, horror and/or science fiction - presents a great appeal to both younger audiences and adults, as the literature of concepts and imagination per se. It represents a creative space for different cultures and groups to explore present and future challenges and polarizing perspectives, as the ever-popular dystopian stories prove. It is the cultural medium par excellence for encouraging critical thinking regarding themes such as shared cultural heritage, foreign traditions, and philosophical questions regarding citizenship, freedom, democracy and the sense of belonging. Despite its huge present-day success in cinematic outputs, outside the major European languages, there is a tendency for published SGF in lesser used languages countries to remain untranslated, barring new audiences in engaging with interesting works and ideas. The Transnational Indie Speculative Project (IndieSpec) is a three indie publishers consortium project (Divergência Editorial Group, OsuusKumma, and Lira-K), from Portugal (PT), Finland (FIN), and Ukraine (UKR), European underrepresented countries with less used languages. This consortium curated a body of works to be translated, published, distributed and promoted not only presenting an interesting collection of engaging stories but also forming a resonance tapestry among them, by a common theme backbone. This resonance sustains diversity as a unifying strength, regardless of the culture and language, with great potential to attract young readers and general public alike. IndieSpec will deliver a corpus of eleven books for 16 translated outcomes (3 FIN/PT, 5 UKR/PT, 3 PT/FIN, 3 PT/UKR, 1 FIN/UKR and 1 UKR/FIN) and 5 published, distributed and promoted near the displaced Ukrainian communities in their native language. In addition, IndieSpec intends to set a Carbon Mitigation Strategy, as a step-forward in its current policies, to encourage green practices in the editorial sector.