Mark Stanisforth on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shadow jury (2)

Posted 19 April 2012 by Guest blogger

This year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist presented our 'Shadow' judging team with an unusually strenuous task. With three of the fifteen choices weighing in at well over six hundred pages (in the case of Parallel Stories, more than a thousand), it was always going to be a challenge to achieve a broad overview of the contenders prior to our 'Shadow' shortlist announcement.

However, the collective efforts of our team of seven bloggers headed by chairman Stuart Allen at Winstonsdad, ensured each book received thorough consideration.

Between us, fifty-three separate reviews of the longlisted titles have been posted so far, with more to come. The aim of our separate, 'Shadow' shortlist was not to seek to mirror the judges' official verdict, but simply to highlight those we enjoyed and admired the most. The fact that only two books - Sjon's From The Mouth Of The Whale and Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery made it onto both the official and 'Shadow' lists is a surprise, but it also serves to underline the strength in depth of this year's longlist.

We achieved our shortlist using a scoring system comprising marks out of twenty for the book itself, and out of ten for the quality of its translation. These marks were then averaged to create a league table of titles, with the top six making the cut.

For the record, the full 'Shadow' shortlist is as follows, in alphabetical order:

From The Mouth Of The Whale by Sjon
Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki
Parallel Stories by Peter Nadas
Scenes From Village Life by Amos Oz
Seven Houses In France by Bernardo Atxaga
The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

Just like the official panel, our next task is to pick a winner, which we will announce at some point prior to the official announcement on May 14. It will not be easy. We each have our favourites, and broad consensus rather than unanimity is likely to win the day, which, again, is testament to the quality of those books still in with a shout.

The full 'Shadow' team is Lisa at ANZLitLovers, Gary at Parrish Lantern, Mark at Eleutherophobia, Rob at Rob Around Books, Simon at Inside Books, Stu at Winstonsdad and Tony at Tony's Reading List.

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