Are you watching the Women’s World Cup? The tournament began on June 6 with teams from 24 countries competing in cities around Canada, and the Round of 16 starts tomorrow. If you'd like to indulge in some reading between matches, we've got lots of suggestions for you. Whether or not you're  a soccer fan, you can cheer on your favorites in the Women's Literary World Cup. All readers are welcome!

During the 2014 World Cup last summer we had a “Literary World Cup” book display at the Mid-Manhattan Library, featuring authors from the countries playing in the tournament. We got the idea from the LA Public Library after seeing their wonderful #LiteraryWorldCup posts on social media. This year we thought it would be fun to highlight women authors from all the countries represented in the 2015 Women’s World Cup, from the author of a classic 11th century Japanese novel to popular 21st century Scandinavian crime fiction writers.

As you can see, we haven’t put eleven players on each team as there would be on an actual soccer team. It would  be no difficult task to find eleven excellent women authors from the United States whose work is widely available in English, but unfortunately, that’s not the case for writers from all the countries on the list. We limited the lists for Canada, England, France, Spain, and the United States to six authors each and included some of our favorites but have probably left out some of yours. In an effort to balance out the teams somewhat, we also listed a few American and British authors under their countries of birth (e.g. Nora Okja Keller under South Korea and Helen Oyeyemi under Nigeria.)

Please feel free to suggest other authors you would like to see included on the “teams,” and if you have a favorite woman author from a country that is not playing in the 2015 World Cup, we’d also love to see those recommendations in the comments section below. Our 2015 Summer Reading theme is “escape the ordinary”; we hope this Women’s Literary World Cup is an opportunity to discover some new authors and new worlds!

Thanks to Jessica Cline, Vilma Alvarez, Nancy Aravecz, Hung-Yun Chang, Melissa Scheurer, and Billy Parrott for help with this list!