In the 1990s, there was ample reason to celebrate the literary journal created at the University of Oklahoma seven decades before. After all, World Literature Today had the articles, the academia and the awards that lured literary giants like Gabriel García Márquez to Norman. 

And yet, there was a creeping concern: the magazine didn’t matter enough to OU students. And if things didn’t change, WLT might not survive. The magazine needed to rise to the next level.

“We jumped in and started the revolution to turn an academic-only publication into a magazine that could reach out to the world—to be something people wanted to read,” says Executive Director Robert Con Davis-Undiano, who joined the magazine in 1999.

Flash forward to its centennial year in 2026, and WLT has become a fully made-over, self-sustaining and digitized magazine. The essay-driven focus now includes cultural coverage and photography. Beyond its quarterly print run of 2,500 issues, WLT annually reaches over 2.25 million worldwide readers online (roughly equal to one estimate of global Sooner football fans). And the magazine is ringing in its 100th birthday with an on-campus museum exhibit, a related anthology and a string of events that is keeping Norman on the world literary map.

The enduring source for this vision sits by a stack of books and journals in Davis-Undiano’s office: a bronze bust of Roy Temple House, the founder of a 32-page pamphlet he called Books Abroad back in 1927. 

House led the OU Department of Modern Languages before volunteering to aid refugees and orphans in Europe following World War I. He returned to OU energized and with a new purpose—to help people better understand the world’s cultures. He took inspiration from Johann Wolfgang van Goethe’s call for Weltliteratur (“world literature”), neatly coined in 1827, exactly 100 years before. 

House only had $150 to make two issues of the “little magazine,” as he called it. Books Abroad grew by the decade before evolving into World Literature Today in 1977.

“Roy Temple House was an absolute visionary,” Davis-Undiano says. “He inspires us all the time, every day.”

Helping manifest that same spirit is current WLT Assistant Director and Editor-in-Chief Daniel Simon, who—like House—grew up in Nebraska. Though a lifelong bookworm, he briefly considered pursuing engineering at the University of Nebraska before enrolling in a Shakespeare course.

“After that, I was a lost cause,” he recalls.

Simon joined WLT in 2002 (“a dream job”) and has helped the magazine expand from a more Eurocentric focus to include writers from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Simon regularly builds thematic issues that bridge literature and cultural topics with timely events, such as a 2022 issue on Ukraine or the July 2025 issue “Gaza Voices,” which is a National Magazine Award finalist.

Simon says WLT’s team of just six employees produces an equal number of issues per year, often involving a triage of sorts while coordinating guest editors and contributors. But with more than 60 languages represented in WLT ’s pages, the world is noticing their hard work.

“I go into Google Analytics now and can see that people in India and the Philippines are among our most avid readers,” Simon says. The entire WLT archive is now also accessible digitally.

Then there’s WLT ’s internship program, with up to 40 students contributing to the publication each semester. OU Department of English Professor Rilla Askew, a fifth-generation Oklahoman, is an American Book Award-winning novelist who regularly touts the “vital international pulse” of WLT. But Askew admits she rarely finds a need to bring opportunities at the magazine to her students’ attention.

“Most of them are three steps ahead of me,” she laughs.

Askew’s students have often enrolled in WLT classes or designed covers as interns. She mentions Alex Crayon, now a Ph.D. candidate teaching creative writing at the University of Kansas, who previously reviewed books for WLT as an OU undergraduate.

“It launched his publishing career,” Askew says.

WLT ’s awards and events, meanwhile, keep the global literary world coming to OU. Since 1968, the annual Puterbaugh Festival of International Literature and Culture, named for philanthropist J.G. Puterbaugh, has attracted writers like Kenzaburō Ōe from Japan. This year’s April event focused on Persian music and writing, featuring the heralded Rumi translations by Haleh Liza Gafori. Uncannily prescient, WLT ’s event came only weeks after the initial U.S. strike upon Iran, offering yet another important platform for broader discussion of world events.

The publication’s biggest claim to fame, however, remains its biennial Neustadt International Prize of Literature, conceived in 1969 by Ivar Ivask, who served as WLT’s editor-in-chief and director for 24 years. Many Neustadt candidates, such as Orhan Pamuk from Turkey or Mo Yan from China, have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Perhaps the same fate will come for this year’s winner, poet and novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah. 

“For 50 years,” Simon says, “the Neustadt has really been considered ‘the American Nobel.’ ”

This success has spawned other awards, including the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature since 2003, and soon, the new Atluri Family Prize in Literature focusing on South and Southeast Asian writers. This wide-open, inclusive gaze has always made a big impact outside the United States. Davis-Undiano remembers meeting writers and editors from former Soviet states at WLT events.

“They said, ‘We couldn’t get news from the outside, but we could always depend on World Literature Today to tell us what was going on in the literary world.’ They had tears in their eyes. That really spoke to me.

“The Neustadt’s role—and that of all of our programs—is to be a guiding light to the world to recognize and reward deserving writers everywhere,” he says.

And yet, Davis-Undiano points out, some outsiders still are amazed to learn WLT hangs its hat in a prairie town.

Mexican publisher and writer Octavio Paz, for one, believed this was meant to be. In his 1982 Neustadt acceptance speech, he credited Books Abroad for first exposing him to world literature while a student in the 1930s. Notably, he compared the expansive views afforded by Oklahoma’s plains to a metaphorical “navigable sea” that uniquely offers both “a challenge and an invitation.” 

Those words spawned the title of Simon’s new anthology, A Compass on the Navigable Sea: 100 Years of World Literature. The book includes Paz’s speech, in which he “talks about the plurality and universality in world literature which allows us … the greatest range of possible expression,” Simon says. “That’s the essential dynamic at play in the magazine.”

That Oklahoma remains the resourceful home to such a bridge-building mission via world literature is a testament not only to House’s initial vision, but the courage to adapt it for modern times. 

And Davis-Undiano wouldn’t want WLT to be anywhere else. 

“Here in Oklahoma, there is a belief that we have to make sense of the world around us, it’s not just a given,” he says. “We have to be bold—no one else is waiting to do it.” 

Robert Reid is a writer and video producer based in Oregon.

A Gift for WLT’s Second Century

The story of a new World Literature Today prize began with simple serendipity. Years ago, an avid reader and physician, Dr. Rao L. Atluri, happened upon an issue of WLT in a California bookstore. What began as a chance discovery became a long-standing subscription, a growing admiration for the magazine, and—eventually—a conversation with the magazine’s leadership about how he might further WLT ’s mission.

That conversation has now blossomed into a significant gift from the Atluri family, establishing a new biennial literary prize to honor writers whose work emerges from South and Southeast Asia.

“I believe that we must cultivate greater friendship and understanding among people around the world,” Atluri says. “When we truly listen to one another our hearts and minds open. Division often begins with a lack of empathy for others, and literature—through prose and poetry—has the power and strength to bridge and deepen understanding.” 

Building on the international prestige of WLT ’s Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Atluri Family Prize in Literature will offer both the meaningful support of a $50,000 award and heightened visibility and esteem to its recipients. For the Atluris, the gift reflects a deep commitment to education and global understanding. For WLT, it is a fitting way to launch the magazine’s second century—by amplifying more new voices and perspectives.

To learn more about the March to 100 campaign for World Literature Today, visit worldliteraturetoday.org/donate.

Editor's Note: To commemorate the centennial of  World Literature Today, that magazine’s art director and editors took a deep dive into archives to choose the 10 best covers of the past 50 years. The covers showcase a vibrant mix of unique artwork, original illustrations and commissioned photo shoots by award-winning Oklahoma painters and photographers, as well as nationally and internationally recognized artists. A special exhibit, The Art of the Literary Magazine: The Top 10 Covers of World Literature Today 1977-2026, will open at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in September.

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