As you may know, this year I’m focusing on authors from Latin America. Being from Brazil, this continent is very familiar to me, and I’ve already spent time exploring Argentine, Chilean, and Colombian literature.

So I thought I had a decent grasp of South American literature—at least until I started looking for books from countries that rarely make it onto international reading lists: Paraguay, Bolivia, Suriname, and Guyana. It feels odd to call these “lesser known” countries, since Bolivia, and especially Paraguay, are close neighbors from a Brazilian perspective.

But this seems to follow a pattern I’ve noticed elsewhere: certain countries consistently dominate the “to-read” lists. In South America, it’s Argentina, Colombia, Chile, and Brazil. It’s hard to argue against their place—names like Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), and Isabel Allende (Chile) are impossible to ignore in any South American literary canon.

Still, I wonder if there’s also an economic factor at play. Bolivia and Paraguay, for example, are the only landlocked countries on the continent. That, along with other factors, has often left them lagging behind economically.

It’s no surprise that a country’s literary influence is tied to its wealth. Beyond cultural traditions (Europe, for instance, will likely always be seen as the cradle of “classic literature”), economic stability plays a huge role. Literary talent doesn’t just emerge spontaneously—it needs cultivation. Writers need the time and resources to dedicate themselves to their craft. Publishers need funds to print and distribute books widely. Festivals and prizes help authors gain recognition.

All of this becomes difficult, if not impossible, in countries where frequent economic crises leave much of the population facing chronic unemployment and instability.

The Bolivian writer Maximiliano Barrientos put it perfectly in an interview with Latin American Literature Today:

“Bolivia has always occupied a marginal place in the Latin American panorama. We write from the periphery. The peripheral condition is what has defined Bolivian literature, not only because we were absent during the boom, but because we never had an infrastructure to develop literature as a profession, as happened in other countries, where there were promotions and incentives, such as scholarships for writing and an established literary market.”

That’s one of the reasons I appreciate the Read the World Challenge. By committing to read at least one book from every country, instead of sticking only to the most famous South American authors, no nation gets left behind. Even if it takes extra effort to track down books from Bolivia or Paraguay, the challenge forces us to seek them out. Of course, this doesn’t resolve the deeper issue of inequality within each country, but it’s one small way of broadening our reading horizons.

Reading beyond the literary “giants” reminds us that every country has voices worth hearing, even if the global stage doesn’t amplify them equally. By looking to the margins, we discover not just overlooked writers, but also new ways of seeing the world.