When I think about Joanne Rowling's place in contemporary culture, I recall that a few years ago the most translated author in the world was found to be the English children's writer Enid Blyton

When I think about Joanne Rowling's place in contemporary culture, I recall that a few years ago the most translated author in the world was found to be the English children's writer Enid Blyton. Not Shakespeare, not the Apostles, not Agatha Christie or Daniel Defoe, but Enid Blyton.

For almost half a century she remained the best-known children's author in the world, and, having written several hundred books for children from the age of three to late adolescence, she also turned out to be the most translated. The question is whether any of us had ever heard the name.

How did this come about? Quite simply: Blyton received enormous print runs mainly thanks to the old British colonies and to countries where English is a second or third language. It was enough for her to be published for decades in the markets of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Egypt, several African countries and a few in Western Europe. People who did not live there in the 1930s to 1990s have very likely never heard of Enid Blyton either. In some places her works were even included in the school curriculum, and, naturally, an authoress who ruled children's literature for 30 years and was known to at least three generations was actively translated into national languages. Moreover, texts were sometimes produced in those languages that had not been written by Blyton at all: her plots were simply reworked and written afresh with local realities in mind.

The screen adaptations, however, unlike the texts of Rowling, never won worldwide fame. You will be surprised, but Blyton was adapted for the screen even in the twenty-first century, though I personally have never come across these films: “The Famous Five”, “Noddy”, “Malory Towers”, “The Adventure Series”, “St Clare's”, “Five Have a Mystery to Solve”, “The Secret Seven”. Has anyone at all seen these series, cartoons, television shows?

Blyton could not escape accusations of failing to meet modern values either, and she was touched by laughable charges of racism for plots such as the one in which nobody wanted to be friends with a black doll until it was caught in the rain and washed itself white.

She was also translated into Russian, but I have nothing to say about her texts.