The success of Christopher Nolan's film The Odyssey goes far beyond the box office: sales of Homer's epic poem increased by 1400% in the first four weeks of July in the United Kingdom, according to data from the NielsenIQ institute.
A rush on all available translations
At Waterstones, Britain's leading bookstore chain, sales of the 2017 translation by specialist Emily Wilson have jumped by over 1000% compared to 2025, a trend the chain is also seeing across all its other available translations. NielsenIQ also notes significant increases for other works related to mythology, including The Iliad, Madeline Miller's Circe, and Margaret Atwood's Penelope's Odyssey. On Spotify, searches for translations of Homer's works have increased by 310%.
In France, this enthusiasm is also evident in bookstores. According to NielsenIQ BookData reported by Livres Hebdo, Christophe Ono-dit-Biot's essay, L'Odyssée de l'Odyssée, published in April by Grasset, topped the essay sales charts for the week with over 11,000 copies sold. Le Livre de Poche, for its part, reports that sales of its own edition of L'Odyssée quadrupled in July compared to previous months.
An adaptation that divides specialists in Antiquity
This commercial success has sparked a more heated debate among translators and specialists in Greek mythology. Some regret that the film imperfectly adapts the richness of the original text, while others applaud the enthusiasm it has generated for the work. This effect is not unprecedented: in 2024, the release of the film The Count of Monte Cristo, starring Pierre Niney, led to a similar increase in sales of Alexandre Dumas's novel.
Publishers are ramping up their releases to capitalize on this renewed interest, with reissues, rewrites, and analyses of the original text. Leduc, for example, is set to release an illustrated and annotated edition of The Odyssey in a beautiful hardcover format on September 24th.
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