This year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlist sees diverse themes of history, war and love battling it out for the £10,000 Prize, to be announced at an awards ceremony in central London on 20 May at the Royal Institute of British Architects.
The shortlist features authors from Africa, Spain,The Netherlands, Argentina, Croatia and Albania. Both Ismail Kadare’s story The Fall of the Stone City and Croatian author Daša Drndić’s Trieste, explore the tension and horror of Nazi encounters and their after-effects. Meanwhile love is questioned in Dutch story The Detour, by Gerbrand Bakker, which follows an unfaithful wife who has exiled herself to an isolated farm in Wales, leaving her husband to hire a private detective to trace her and Andrés Neuman’s epic novel Traveller of the Century explores an affair between the hearts, minds and bodies of two literary translators. Also on the shortlist is a story of the people and animals of Africa, and the limitations they share in Chris Barnard’s Bundu. Completing the line-up, Dublinesque sees a Spanish publisher travel to Dublin to hold a funeral for the age of print and honour James Joyce on Bloomsday. Penned by Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque was translated by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean, who has won the IFFP twice previously.
The Independent Foreign Prize honours the best work of fiction by a living author, which has been translated into English from any other language and published in the United Kingdom. Uniquely, the IFFP gives the winning author and translator equal status.
The shortlist
Six titles have been shortlisted for the 2013 Prize, worth £10,000, which is split between the author and translator equally. They are:
* Bundu by Chris Barnard. Translated from the Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns (Alma Books)
* The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker. Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer (Harvill Secker)
* Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. Translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean (Harvill Secker)
* The Fall of the Stone City by Ismail Kadare. Translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson (Canongate)
* Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman. Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia (Pushkin Press)
* Trieste by Daša Drndić. Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać (Maclehose Press)
Judge and award-winning novelist Elif Shafak said: ‘In a world where a deeper cross-cultural understanding is a rarity and literature in translation is still not generating the interest it deserves, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize swims against the tide. Right from the beginning it was a beautiful challenge to be on the judging panel. Our shortlist reflects a mesmerizing diversity of styles, genres and languages around the globe. What is common in all is the mellifluousness of the writing and the translation together, a boundless imagination, an eloquent prose and the ability to reach out to people across boundaries-be it national, religious, class or sexual.’
Antonia Byatt, Director of Literature at Arts Council England, said: ‘_This formidable shortlist highlights the richness and variety of fiction from across the globe, which readers here can enjoy and explore thanks to translators’ incredible skill. We want readers to have access to the best of world fiction, in particular from languages and literatures under-represented in English. This shortlist encapsulates the excitement of looking outwards and discovering new and different voices_.’
Hepworth Book Group pick their #IFFP shortlist
Keith from Hepworth Book Group tells us about a recent meeting where they made their own estimation of what would be the six books on the IFFP shortlist:
The process we used to arrive at this list was to look on the Amazon website for each of the 16 books on the longlist and use the “look inside” feature to read a sample of each book plus looking at the blurb, reviews etc. The ranking criteria were, given this information such as we’d get if browsing in a bookshop, would we have bought the book to read. The Hepworth Book Group’s IFFP shortlist and our ranking at this stage is:
* Gerbrand Bakker: The Detour (3)
* Alain Mabanckou: Black Bazaar (1)
* Orhan Pamuk: Silent House (5)
* Laurence Binet: HHhH (4)
* Chris Barnard: Bundu (2)
* Pia Juul: The Murder of Hallande (6)
Hepworth Book Group are part of our Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Readers Project, being run in partnership with Booktrust and Free Word. Over 20 reading groups and book clubs from across the country will be shadowing this year’s Prize – reading, debating, blogging about and reviewing the shortlisted titles and coming together at Free Word for a Readers’ Day in May.
Meet our IFFP reading groups here and here.
What would be on your IFFP shortlist?
