Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2013
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Winner
The Detour
Harvill SeckerA Dutch woman rents a remote farm in rural Wales. She says her name is Emilie. She is a lecturer doing some research, and sets about making the farmhouse more homely. When she arrives there are ten geese living in the garden but one by one they disappear. Perhaps it's the work of a local fox. She has fled from an unbearable situation having recently confessed to an affair with one of her students. In Amsterdam, her stunned husband forms a strange partnership with a detective who agrees to help him trace her. They board the ferry to Hull on Christmas Eve. Back on the farm, a young man out walking with his dog injures himself and stays the night, then ends up staying longer. Yet something is deeply wrong. Does he know what he is getting himself into? And what will happen when her husband and the policeman arrive? Gerbrand Bakker has made the territories of isolation, inner turmoil and the solace offered by the natural world his own. The Detour is a deeply moving new novel, shot through with longing and the quiet tragedy of everyday lives.
The Detour
Gerbrand Bakker
Winner, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
A Dutch woman rents a remote farm in rural Wales. She says her name is Emilie. She is a lecturer doing some research, and sets about making the farmhouse more homely. When she arrives there are ten geese living in the garden but one by one they disappear. Perhaps it's the work of a local fox. She has fled from an unbearable situation having recently confessed to an affair with one of her students. In Amsterdam, her stunned husband forms a strange partnership with a detective who agrees to help him trace her. They board the ferry to Hull on Christmas Eve. Back on the farm, a young man out walking with his dog injures himself and stays the night, then ends up staying longer. Yet something is deeply wrong. Does he know what he is getting himself into? And what will happen when her husband and the policeman arrive? Gerbrand Bakker has made the territories of isolation, inner turmoil and the solace offered by the natural world his own. The Detour is a deeply moving new novel, shot through with longing and the quiet tragedy of everyday lives.
Publisher: Harvill Secker
IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner Gerbrand Bakker wins the £10,000 prize with latest novel The Detour.
Dutch tale The Detour has been announced as the winner of the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, at an awards ceremony sponsored by Tattinger in London, tonight, 20th May 2013. Themes of infidelity, exile and isolation won over the judges of this year’s Prize to give the author his second major prize win. His previous novel The Twin won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Translator David Colmer will share the prize money with Bakker, in this unique award that recognises writer and translator equally.
The Detour follows Emilie, a translation professor and Emily Dickinson scholar, who retreats from her life in the Netherlands to an isolated farm house in Wales following an affair with a student. A young man hiking past the farmhouse with his dog stays for a night but ends up remaining longer, helping the woman to make repairs to the farmhouse and easing her self-imposed loneliness. But back in Amsterdam her husband forms a bond with a detective who agrees to help him find his wife. Something is deeply wrong at the farmhouse – and what will happen when the husband and detective finally track Emilie down?
Judge and literary editor of the Independent, Boyd Tonkin said of the winner:
'Swift-moving and apparently straightforward, but with mysterious hidden depths, The Detour is a novel that grips its reader tight and never lets go. Gerbrand Bakker’s tale of a Dutchwoman who goes missing from her own troubled life and seeks refuge in rural Wales combines mesmeric storytelling with an uncanny sense of place, and an atmosphere of brooding, irresistible menace. In David Colmer’s pitch-perfect and immersive translation, this book will both linger in your imagination and, quite possibly, haunt your dreams as well.'
Also given a special mention as a very close contender for this year’s Prize was Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia. The book has at its heart a secret affair between two translators, who between bed and the dictionary build their own fragile language. An epic novel of philosophy, history and love, this is the fourth novel by Andrés Neuman who was named as one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish Language Novelists in 2010.
Bakker fought off strong competition from a prestigious shortlist including Man Booker International Prize Winner Ismail Kadare from Albania. Also shortlisted were Croatian author Daša Drndić, Chris Barnard from South Africa and Enrique Vila-Matas from Spain. Vila-Matas’ novel Dublinesque was translated together by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean, who has previously won the IFFP twice and had a second title longlisted for the Prize this year, The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vasquez.
This year, Booktrust, who manages the Prize, piloted a Readers’ Project, with 300 Readers shadowing the six shortlisted titles. The readers gathered together at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon on 18 May for a mini-festival, featuring a talk from author Elif Shafak, a translation duel, a Google Hangout with the shortlisted authors and translators, and a vote on their favourite title, crowned the Independent Foreign Fiction Readers’ Prize (IFFRP) winner. The Readers’ Project is funded by the Free Word Strategic Commissioning Fund and the NALD Futures Fund (administered by Writers’ Centre Norwich). English PEN, the Reading Agency and the British Centre for Literary Translation are partnering on the project with Booktrust. A bespoke piece of research will provide a detailed study of the barriers to readers’ engagement with world literature and make recommendations for the trade to overcome them. The research will be promoted nationally and internationally in the second half of 2013.
About the shortlist
Andrés Neuman adds some fire to this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Shortlist with his epic novel Traveller of the Century, which explores an affair between the hearts, minds and bodies of two literary translators. Together they build a language of understanding as they work to translate European poetry, whilst continuing a secret sexual relationship, leading them to ask if translation itself is an act of love. The full shortlist sees diverse themes of history, war and love battling it out for the £10,000 Prize, to be announced on 20 May.
The prestigious shortlist features authors from Africa, Spain, The Netherlands, Argentina, Croatia and from Albania, the winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize, Ismail Kadare. Both 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. 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.
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.
The judges on the shortlist
Boyd Tonkin on Bundu
Compact, colourful, freighted with great issues but written (and translated) with pace and grace, Bundu should introduce UK readers to a giant of South African fiction. A playwright, song- and screenwriter as well as novelist, Chris Barnard helped lead the Sixties revival of literature in Afrikaans. His latest novel sketches a limbo-land between South Africa and Mozambique, where a researcher into baboon behaviour finds a very human crisis on his drought-stricken doorstep as desperate refugees cross the border. Swift-moving but enigmatic, the ensuing action may feel closer to the frontier fables of a J M Coetzee than the bush yarns of a Wilbur Smith. Nonetheless, Barnard's ideas-rich adventure, superbly served by translator Michiel Heyns, excites as much as it challenges the reader.
Jean Boase-Beier on The Detour
This is an apparently simple tale of a woman who goes to live in an isolated cottage in Wales. But there is an unsettling sense of impending doom. Why is she here? What will happen to her? The story is deeply involving, the dialogue utterly convincing, the translation near perfect. Unpretentious, restrained and profound, The Detour is everything a novel should be.
Gabriel Josipovici on Dublinesque
A comic book that is both serious and profound is rare enough these days to be a cause for celebration. Combining the celebration of the trivial and the ordinary that we find in Schwitters or Perec with the hint of mad tongue-in-cheek apocalypse that we find in Duchamp and Bernhard, Vila-Matas' Dublinesque is nonetheless imbued with its own distinct aura: that of a world becalmed after the storms that beset culture and the arts in the course of the twentieth century. The question at its heart is whether that calm is a sign of peace come at last or of the absence of any life-giving wind. It is a question that haunts us all.
Frank Wynne on The Fall of the Stone City
With biting wit and a bleak pathos, this tale of two doctors cursed with the same name becomes a palimpsest of the history of Albania. The lightness and wry humour of Kadare's tale of tyranny and torture makes the fate of the characters - nebulous ciphers, ghosts and doppelgängers - all the more devastating. In John Hodgson's limpid and lyrical translation captures Kadare's deft interweaving of history and myth in this hallucinatory fable where dream and reality blur and language refashions history which, with each retelling, grows darker and more brutal while truth remains ineffable.
Elif Shafak on Traveller of the Century
Hans, a young traveller and translator, arrives at Wandernburg-a small town in post-Napoleonic Germany that feels equally mundane and magical. There is a familiarity and a surrealness about every street he crosses, each person he meets from then on, as though we, the readers, recognize this place from another life. Very few novels in world literature can build up an atmosphere as deftly and convincingly as the Traveller of the Century has done. This is a wonderful novel of ideas. It is a story of love, loneliness and journeys, spiritual and intellectual. Andres Neuman's story will envelop you like a morning fog and when you have finished reading, when the fog dissolves, you might see the world differently. Every year hundreds of books are published but rarely comes a book that reminds us of why we loved reading in the first place, that innermost quest for words and dreams. Traveller of the Century is a literary gem.
Frank Wynne on Trieste
From the red basket at her feet, Haya Tedeschi draws out a harrowing tale in aching memories, tattered photos, maps and heartrending litanies. At the heart of this audacious, fractured tale, the poignant search of a mother for the son abducted as part of the Lebensborn programme shimmers liked a flawed jewel. Ellen Elias-Bursac's luminous translation brings both pathos and veracity to the often disorienting blizzard of facts, of names and voices in Daša Drndić's documentary novel. Sprawling, terrifying and meticulously detailed, Trieste capturesthe true horror and confusion of war.
Shortlist
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The Detour
Harvill Secker
The Detour
Gerbrand Bakker
Shortlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
A Dutch woman rents a remote farm in rural Wales. She says her name is Emilie. She is a lecturer doing some research, and sets about making the farmhouse more homely. When she arrives there are ten geese living in the garden but one by one they disappear. Perhaps it's the work of a local fox. She has fled from an unbearable situation having recently confessed to an affair with one of her students. In Amsterdam, her stunned husband forms a strange partnership with a detective who agrees to help him trace her. They board the ferry to Hull on Christmas Eve. Back on the farm, a young man out walking with his dog injures himself and stays the night, then ends up staying longer. Yet something is deeply wrong. Does he know what he is getting himself into? And what will happen when her husband and the policeman arrive? Gerbrand Bakker has made the territories of isolation, inner turmoil and the solace offered by the natural world his own. The Detour is a deeply moving new novel, shot through with longing and the quiet tragedy of everyday lives.
Publisher: Harvill Secker
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Bundu
Alma Books
Bundu
Chris Barnard
Shortlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
In a place near Mozambique where no one knows the boundary, drought is changing everything. Tens then hundreds of people seek refuge in a forgotten outpost where a clinic is run by lonely souls of uncertain training, nuns staunchly determined to serve. But the inundation soon becomes too much for them, and there is no help from outside. Within the small community of outsiders a plan takes shape that is as outrageous as it is inspired, when Brand de la Rey, an ecologist who is researching the local baboons, organizes a desperate mission for more supplies, using a damaged airplane that is unfit for purpose.
Publisher: Alma Books
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Trieste
MacLehose Press
Trieste
Daša Drndić
Shortlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, north-eastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen from her by the German authorities during the War as part of Himmler's clandestine 'Lebensborn' project, which strove for a 'racially pure' Germany. Haya's reflection on her Catholicized Jewish family's experiences deals unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps and fragments of verse, to testimonies from the Nuremberg trials and interviews with second-generation Jews, as well as witness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. A broad collage of material is assembled, and the lesser-known horror of Nazi occupation in northern Italy is gradually unveiled. Written in immensely powerful language, and employing a range of astonishing conceptual devices, Trieste is a novel like no other. Dasa Drndic has produced a shattering contribution to the literature of our twentieth-century history.
Publisher: MacLehose Press
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The Fall of the Stone City
Canongate
The Fall of the Stone City
Ismail Kadare
Shortlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
In September 1943, German soldiers advance on the ancient gates of Gjirokaster, Albania. It is the first step in a carefully planned invasion. But once at the mouth of the city, the troops are taken aback by a surprising act of rebellion that leaves the citizens fearful of a bloody counter-attack. Soon rumours circulate, in cafes, houses and alleyways, that the Nazi Colonel in command of the German Army was once a school acquaintance of a local dignitary, Doctor Gurameto. In the town square, Colonel von Schwabe greets his former classmate warmly; in return, Doctor Gurameto invites him to dinner. The very next day, the Colonel and his army disappear from the city. The dinner at Gurameto's house changes the course of events in twentieth-century Europe. But as the citizens celebrate their hero, a conspiracy surfaces which leads some to place Gurameto - and the stone city - at the heart of a plot to undermine Socialism. Enigmatic and compelling, The Fall of the Stone City displays Ismail Kadare at the height of his considerable powers.
Publisher: Canongate
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Traveller of the Century
Pushkin Press
Traveller of the Century
Andrés Neuman
Shortlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
In post-Napoleonic Germany, a traveller on his way to Dessau stops off for a night in the mysterious city of Wandernburg. He intends to move on the following day, but the town begins to ensnare him with its strange, shifting geography. After befriending an old organ grinder and falling for the daughter of a local merchant, he soon finds it impossible to leave. A novel of philosophy and love, politics and waltzes, history and the here-and-now, Traveller of the Century is a journey into the soul of Europe, penned by one of the most exciting South-American writers of our time.
Publisher: Pushkin Press
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Dublinesque
Harvill Secker
Dublinesque
Enrique Vila-Matas
Shortlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Samuel Riba is about to turn 60. A successful publisher in Barcelona, he has edited many of his generation's most important authors. But he is increasingly prone to attacks of anxiety - inspired partly by giving up alcohol, and partly by his worries about the future of the book. Looking for distraction, he concocts a spur-of-the-moment trip to Dublin, a city he has never visited but once had a vivid dream about. Riba sets off for Dublin on the pretext that he wishes to honour James Joyce's Ulysses, and to hold, on Bloomsday, a funeral for the age of print. But as he and his friends give their orations, a mysterious figure in a mackintosh hovers in the cemetery, looking rather like Joyce's protege Samuel Beckett. Is it Beckett, or is it the writer of genius that Riba has spent his whole career trying, and failing, to find? As he ponders this, and other profound questions, he marks a death but makes some illuminating discoveries about life. Mixing fact and fiction, irony and pathos, Dublinesque is a novel of ideas that grabs at your heart. Its first English-language publication will coincide with Bloomsday 2012, a significant year for Joyce lovers in that it marks the ninetieth anniversary of the publication of Ulysses, and the year Joyce's work comes out of copyright.
Publisher: Harvill Secker
Longlist
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The Detour
Harvill Secker
The Detour
Gerbrand Bakker
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
A Dutch woman rents a remote farm in rural Wales. She says her name is Emilie. She is a lecturer doing some research, and sets about making the farmhouse more homely. When she arrives there are ten geese living in the garden but one by one they disappear. Perhaps it's the work of a local fox. She has fled from an unbearable situation having recently confessed to an affair with one of her students. In Amsterdam, her stunned husband forms a strange partnership with a detective who agrees to help him trace her. They board the ferry to Hull on Christmas Eve. Back on the farm, a young man out walking with his dog injures himself and stays the night, then ends up staying longer. Yet something is deeply wrong. Does he know what he is getting himself into? And what will happen when her husband and the policeman arrive? Gerbrand Bakker has made the territories of isolation, inner turmoil and the solace offered by the natural world his own. The Detour is a deeply moving new novel, shot through with longing and the quiet tragedy of everyday lives.
Publisher: Harvill Secker
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Bundu
Alma Books
Bundu
Chris Barnard
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
In a place near Mozambique where no one knows the boundary, drought is changing everything. Tens then hundreds of people seek refuge in a forgotten outpost where a clinic is run by lonely souls of uncertain training, nuns staunchly determined to serve. But the inundation soon becomes too much for them, and there is no help from outside. Within the small community of outsiders a plan takes shape that is as outrageous as it is inspired, when Brand de la Rey, an ecologist who is researching the local baboons, organizes a desperate mission for more supplies, using a damaged airplane that is unfit for purpose.
Publisher: Alma Books
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HHhH
Harvill Secker
HHhH
Laurence Binet
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Two men have been enlisted to kill the head of the Gestapo. This is Operation Anthropoid, Prague, 1942: two Czechoslovakian parachutists sent on a daring mission by London to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich - chief of the Nazi secret services, 'the hangman of Prague', 'the blond beast', 'the most dangerous man in the Third Reich'. His boss is Heinrich Himmler but everyone in the SS says 'Himmler's brain is called Heydrich', which in German spells "HHhH". All the characters in "HHhH" are real. All the events depicted are true. But alongside the nerve-shredding preparations for the attack runs another story: when you are a novelist writing about real people, how do you resist the temptation to make things up? "HHhH" is a panorama of the Third Reich told through the life of one outstandingly brutal man, a story of unbearable heroism and loyalty, revenge and betrayal. It is improbably entertaining and electrifyingly modern, a moving and shattering work of fiction.
Publisher: Harvill Secker
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Trieste
MacLehose Press
Trieste
Daša Drndić
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, north-eastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen from her by the German authorities during the War as part of Himmler's clandestine 'Lebensborn' project, which strove for a 'racially pure' Germany. Haya's reflection on her Catholicized Jewish family's experiences deals unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps and fragments of verse, to testimonies from the Nuremberg trials and interviews with second-generation Jews, as well as witness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. A broad collage of material is assembled, and the lesser-known horror of Nazi occupation in northern Italy is gradually unveiled. Written in immensely powerful language, and employing a range of astonishing conceptual devices, Trieste is a novel like no other. Dasa Drndic has produced a shattering contribution to the literature of our twentieth-century history.
Publisher: MacLehose Press
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Cold Sea Stories
Comma Press
Cold Sea Stories
Pawel Huelle
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
A student pedals an old Ukraina bicycle between striking factories, delivering bulletins, in the tumultuous first days of the Solidarity movement...
A shepherd watches, unseen, as a strange figure disembarks from a pirate ship anchored in the cove below, to bury a chest on the beach that later proves empty…
A prisoner in a Berber dungeon recounts his life’s story – the failed pursuit of the world’s very first language – by scrawling in the sand on his cell floor…
The characters in Pawel Huelle’s mesmerising stories find themselves, willingly or not, at the heart of epic narratives; legends and histories that stretch far beyond the limits of their own lives. Against the backdrop of the Baltic coast, mythology and meteorology mix with the inexorable tide of political change: Kashubian folklore, Chinese mysticism and mediaeval scholarship butt up against the war in Chechnya, 9-11, and the struggle for Polish independence. Central to Huelle’s imagery is the vision of the refugee – be it the Chechen woman carrying her newborn child across the Polish border (her face emblazoned on every TV screen), the survivor of the Gulag re-appearing on his friends’ doorstep, years after being presumed dead, or the stranger who befriends the sole resident of a ghostly Mennonite village in the final days of the Second World War.
Each refugee carries a clue, it seems, or is in possession or pursuit of some mysterious text or book, knowing that only it – like the Chinese ‘Book of Changes’ – can decode their story. What we do with this text, this clue, Huelle seems to say, is up to us.
Publisher: Comma Press
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The Murder of Halland
Peirene Press
The Murder of Halland
Pia Juul
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Denmark's foremost literary author turns crime fiction on its head. Bess and Halland live in a small town, where everyone knows everyone else. When Halland is found murdered in the main square the police encounter only riddles. For Bess bereavement marks the start of a journey that leads her to a reassessment of first friends then family.
Publisher: Peirene Press
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The Fall of the Stone City
Canongate
The Fall of the Stone City
Ismail Kadare
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
In September 1943, German soldiers advance on the ancient gates of Gjirokaster, Albania. It is the first step in a carefully planned invasion. But once at the mouth of the city, the troops are taken aback by a surprising act of rebellion that leaves the citizens fearful of a bloody counter-attack. Soon rumours circulate, in cafes, houses and alleyways, that the Nazi Colonel in command of the German Army was once a school acquaintance of a local dignitary, Doctor Gurameto. In the town square, Colonel von Schwabe greets his former classmate warmly; in return, Doctor Gurameto invites him to dinner. The very next day, the Colonel and his army disappear from the city. The dinner at Gurameto's house changes the course of events in twentieth-century Europe. But as the citizens celebrate their hero, a conspiracy surfaces which leads some to place Gurameto - and the stone city - at the heart of a plot to undermine Socialism. Enigmatic and compelling, The Fall of the Stone City displays Ismail Kadare at the height of his considerable powers.
Publisher: Canongate
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In Praise of Hatred
Transworld
In Praise of Hatred
Khalid Khalifa
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
1980s Syria, our young narrator is living a secluded life behind the veil in the vast and perfumed house of her grandparents in Aleppo. Her three aunts, Maryam, the pious one; Safaa, the liberal; and Marwa, the free-spirited one, bring her up with the aid of their ever-devoted blind servant. Soon the high walls of the family home are unable to protect her from the social and political changes outside. Witnessing the increasing crackdowns of the ruling dictatorship against Muslims, she is filled with hatred for her oppressors, and becomes increasing fundamentalist. In the footsteps of her beloved uncle Bakr, she takes on the party, launching herself into a fight for her religion, her country, and ultimately, her own future. On a backdrop of real-life events that occurred during the Syrian regime's ruthless suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s, In Praise of Hatred is a stirring, sensual story. Its elegant use of traditional, layered storytelling is a powerful echo of the modern-day tragedy that is now taking place in the Middle East.
Publisher: Transworld
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A Death In the Family
Harvill Secker
A Death In the Family
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
In this utterly remarkable novel Karl Ove Knausgaard writes with painful honesty about his childhood and teenage years, his infatuation with rock music, his relationship with his loving yet almost invisible mother and his distant and unpredictable father, and his bewilderment and grief on his father's death. When Karl Ove becomes a father himself, he must balance the demands of caring for a young family with his determination to write great literature. A Death in the Family is a Proustian exploration of his past, in which Knausgaard creates a universal story of the struggles, great and small, that we all face in our lives. A Death in the Family is a profoundly serious, gripping and hugely readable work written as if the author's very life were at stake.
Publisher: Harvill Secker
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Satantango
Tuskar Rock
Satantango
László Krasznahorkai
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm. But when the charismatic Irimias - long-thought dead - returns to the commune, the villagers fall under his spell. The Devil has arrived in their midst. Irimias will divide and rule: his arrival heralds the beginning of a period of violence and greed for the villagers as he sets about swindling them out of a fortune that might allow them to escape the emptiness and futility of their existence. He soon attains a messaianic aura as he plays on the fears of the townsfolk and a series of increasingly brutal events unfold. Satantango follows the villagers as they are exploited and taken in by Irimias; as they drink and stumble their way toward the gradual realization of their mistake and ultimate demise. In its measured prose and long, Tolstoyan sentences, Satantango is nothing short of a literary masterpiece; a formal meditation on death and avarice, human fallibility and faith.
Publisher: Tuskar Rock
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Black Bazaar
Serpent's Tail
Black Bazaar
Alain Mabanckou
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
This is a riotous account of a Black dandy trying to cut it in Paris today. Buttocks Man is down on his uppers. His girlfriend, Original Colour, has cleared out of their Paris studio and run off to the Congo with a vertically challenged drummer known as The Mongrel. She's taken their daughter with her. Meanwhile, a racist neighbour spies on him something wicked, accusing him of 'digging a hole in the Dole'. And his drinking buddies at Jips, the Afro-Cuban bar in Les Halles, pour scorn on Black Bazaar, the journal he keeps to log his sorrows. There are days when only the Arab in the corner shop has a kind word; while at night his dreams are stalked by the cannibal pygmies of Gabon. Then again, Buttocks Man wears no ordinary uppers. He has style, bags of it (suitcases of crocodile and anaconda Westons, to be precise). He's a dandy from the Bacongo district of Brazzaville - AKA a sapeur or member of the Society of Ambience-makers and People of Elegance. But is flaunting sartorial chic against tough times enough for Buttocks Man to cut it in the City of Light?
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
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The Last of the Vostyachs
Dedalus Books
The Last of the Vostyachs
Diego Marani
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
As a child, Ivan and his father worked as forced labourers in a mine in Siberia, the father having committed some minor offence against the regime. He is then murdered in front of his young son, after which Ivan - who is a Vostyach, an imaginary ethnic group of whose language he is the last remaining speaker - is struck dumb by having witnessed his father's murder. Some twenty years later the guards desert their posts and Ivan walks off free, together with the other inmates. Guided by some mysterious power, he returns to the region he originally came from. The Last of the Vostyachs won two literary prizes in Italy: the Premio Campiello and the Premio Stresa.
Publisher: Dedalus Books
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Traveller of the Century
Pushkin Press
Traveller of the Century
Andrés Neuman
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
In post-Napoleonic Germany, a traveller on his way to Dessau stops off for a night in the mysterious city of Wandernburg. He intends to move on the following day, but the town begins to ensnare him with its strange, shifting geography. After befriending an old organ grinder and falling for the daughter of a local merchant, he soon finds it impossible to leave. A novel of philosophy and love, politics and waltzes, history and the here-and-now, Traveller of the Century is a journey into the soul of Europe, penned by one of the most exciting South-American writers of our time.
Publisher: Pushkin Press
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Silent House
Faber
Silent House
Orhan Pamuk
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
In an old mansion in Cennethisar, a former fishing village near Istanbul, an old widow Fatma awaits the annual summer visit of her grandchildren. She has lived in the village for decades, ever since her husband, an idealistic young doctor, first arrived to serve the poor fishermen. Now mostly bedridden, she is attended by her faithful servant Recep, a dwarf and the doctor's illegitimate son. They share memories, and grievances, of the early years, before Cennethisar became a high-class resort. Her visiting grandchildren are Faruk, a dissipated failed historian; his sensitive leftist sister, Nilgun; and Metin, a high school student drawn to the fast life of the nouveaux riches, who dreams of going to America. But it is Recep's nephew Hassan, a high-school dropout, lately fallen in with right-wing nationalists, who will draw the visiting family into the growing political cataclysm issuing from Turkey's tumultuous century-long struggle for modernity.
Publisher: Faber
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The Sound of Things Falling
Bloomsbury
The Sound of Things Falling
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
The dark, brilliant new novel by the author of The Informers and The Secret History of Costaguana.No sooner does he get to know Ricardo Laverde than disaffected young Colombian lawyer Antonio Yammara realises that his new friend has a secret, or rather several secrets. Antonio's fascination with the life of ex-pilot Ricardo Laverde begins by casual acquaintance in a seedy Bogotá billiard hall and grows until the day Ricardo receives a cassette tape in an unmarked envelope. Asking Antonio to find him somewhere private to play it, they go to a library. The first time he glances up from his seat in the next booth, Antonio sees tears running down Laverde's cheeks; the next, the ex-pilot has gone. Shortly afterwards, Ricardo is shot dead on a street corner in Bogotá by a guy on the back of a motorbike and Antonio is caught in the hail of bullets. Lucky to survive, and more out of love with life than ever, he starts asking questions until the questions become an obsession that leads him to Laverde's daughter. His troubled investigation leads all the way back to the early 1960s, marijuana smuggling and a time before the cocaine trade trapped a whole generation of Colombians in a living nightmare of fear and random death. Juan Gabriel Vasquez is one of the leading novelists of his generation, and The Sound of Things Falling that tackles what became of Colombia in the time of Pablo Escobar is his best book to date.
Publisher: Bloomsbury
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Dublinesque
Harvill Secker
Dublinesque
Enrique Vila-Matas
Longlisted, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Samuel Riba is about to turn 60. A successful publisher in Barcelona, he has edited many of his generation's most important authors. But he is increasingly prone to attacks of anxiety - inspired partly by giving up alcohol, and partly by his worries about the future of the book. Looking for distraction, he concocts a spur-of-the-moment trip to Dublin, a city he has never visited but once had a vivid dream about. Riba sets off for Dublin on the pretext that he wishes to honour James Joyce's Ulysses, and to hold, on Bloomsday, a funeral for the age of print. But as he and his friends give their orations, a mysterious figure in a mackintosh hovers in the cemetery, looking rather like Joyce's protege Samuel Beckett. Is it Beckett, or is it the writer of genius that Riba has spent his whole career trying, and failing, to find? As he ponders this, and other profound questions, he marks a death but makes some illuminating discoveries about life. Mixing fact and fiction, irony and pathos, Dublinesque is a novel of ideas that grabs at your heart. Its first English-language publication will coincide with Bloomsday 2012, a significant year for Joyce lovers in that it marks the ninetieth anniversary of the publication of Ulysses, and the year Joyce's work comes out of copyright.
Publisher: Harvill Secker
Biographies of authors and translators
A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgard, translated from the Norwegian by Don Barlett
Karl Ove Knausgaard's first novel, Out of the World, was the first ever debut novel to win the Norweigan's Critics prize. His second novel, A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, was widely acclaimed. A Death in the Family was awarded the prestigious Brage Award, and is being heralded as a masterpiece wherever it appears.
A Death in the Family explores Karl Ove Knausgaard's childhood and teenage years and his bewilderment and grief on his father's death with painful honesty. When Karl Ove Knausgaard's becomes a father himself, he must balance the demands of caring for a young family with his determination to write great literature.
Don Barlett lives in Norfolk and works as a freelance translator of Scandinavian literature. He has translated, or co-translated, a wide variety of Danish and Norwegian novels by such writers as Per Petterson, Lars Saabye Christensen, Roy Jacobsen, Ingvar Ambjørnsen, Jo Nesbø and Ida Jessen.
Black Bazaar by Alain Mabanckou, translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone
Alain Mabanckou is a writer of novels, plays and pertry. He teaches French literature at UCLA in Califorina. Prvious novels, African Psycho, Broken Glass and Memoirs of a Porcupine are also published by Serpent's Tail. He was awarded the Grand Prix de la Littérature in 2012.
Sarah Ardizzone is a translator from the French. Her authors include the young French-Algerian writer Faïza Guène, bande dessinée wunderkind Joann Sfar, indie rock star Mathias Malzieu and maverick thinker Daniel Pennac. She has a special interest in translating sharp dialogue, urban and migrant slang, and in what Alain Mabranckou calls 'a world literature in French'. Sarch appears regularly on the book festival and liver literature circuit, and curates educational programmes around translation, bilingualism and storytelling for all ages. Sarah has also worked as a travel writer, cultural critic, journalist, and literary festival director.
Bundu by Chris Barnard, translated from the Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns
Chris Barnard is one of the leading authors of Afrikaans literature. He has been active in almost every genre, having written novels, songs, plays and screenplays - including the script for Paljas, the first South African film to be nominated for an Oscar. After a career as a journalist, book publisher and film and TV producer, he now lives and writes on his farm outside Nelspruit.
Michiel Heyns was educated in South Africa and at Cambridge and lectured in English literature until recently. Now he is a fulltime writer and translator. He is author of: The Children's Day, The Reluctant Passenger, The Typewriter's Tale, Bodies Politic (winner of the Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English Fiction 2009), Lost Ground (winner of the Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English Fiction and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize 2012), Invisible Furies.
Cold Sea Stories by Pawel Huelle, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Paweł Huelle spent his early writing career as an employee of the Solidarity Movement's press office in the late 1980s. He subsequently achieved great critical success (both domestically and in translation) as a writer of novels, short stories and essays, and has been honoured with numerous awards. His first novel, Who Was David Weiser? was described by critics in Poland as 'the book of the decade', 'a masterpiece' and 'a literary triumph' and elicited comparisons to Günter Grass and Bruno Schulz. Huelle followed this with Moving House and Other Stories, First Love and Other Stories, and then three novels, Mercedes Benz, Castorp and The Last Supper . The novels were published in English translation by Serpent's Tale, with Mercedes Benz and Castorp both shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a full-time translator of Polish literature. Her published translations include fiction by several of Poland's leading contemporary novelists, including The Last Supper by Paweł Huelle, for which she won the Found in Translation Award 2008. Her most recent translations include Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life by Artur Domosławski (Verso), and A Grain of Truth by Zygmunt Miłoszewski (Bitter Lemon), a crime novel. She also translates reportage, poetry, and books for children.
Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean
Born in Barcelona in 1948, Enrique Vila-Matas is widely considered to be on of Spain's most important contemporary novelists, and Dublinesque has been declared his masterpiece. His extraordinary oeuvre, translated in 30 languages, includes Bartleby & Co, Montano, which was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and Never Any End to Paris, which was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award.
Rosalind Harvey is a translator in residence at London's Free Word Centre. Her translation of Juan Villalobo's Down the Rabbit Hole was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award.
Anne McLean has translated Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs and other writings by authors including Hector Abad, Carmen Martín Gaite, Julio Cortázar, Ignacio Martíner de Pisón, Enrique Vila-Matas and Tomás E;ry Martínez. She has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize twice, for Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas in 2004 and for The Armies by Evelio Rosero in 2009.
HHhH by Laurent Binet, translated from the French by Sam Taylor
HHhH is Laurent Binet's first novel. He lives and works in France. HHhH won the prestigious Prix Goncourt du premier roman and the Prix des Lecteurs du Livre de Poche.
Sam Taylor was born in Nottinghamshire. He is the author of three books of fiction, The Republic of Trees, The Amnesiac and The Island at the End of the World. HHhH is his first translation
In Praise of Hatred by Khalid Khalifa, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
Khaled Khalifa was born in 1964, in a village close to Aleppo, Syria. He is the fifth child of a family of thirteen siblings. He studied law at Aleppo University and actively participated in the foundation of Aleph magazine with a group of writers and poets. A few months later, the magazine was closed down by Syrian censorship. He currently lives in Damascus where he writes scripts for cinema and television. In Praise of Hatred was Shortlisted for the Arabic 'Man Booker' prize.
Leri Price recently graduated from the University of Edinburgh with First Class Honours in Arabic. She is currently working on the translation of a novel by Muhammad Aladdin. She lives in Cairo.
Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahovkai, translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes
Laszlo Krasznahovkai was born in 1954. Krasznahovkai has been honoured with numerous literary prizes, among them the highest award of the Hungarian state, the Kossuth Prize and in 1993, the German Bestenliste Prize for the best literary work of the year.
Born in Budapest in 1948 George Szirtes came to England with his family as a refugee in 1956. He has published some fourteen books of poetry and has won the Faber Prize, in 1980 for The Slant Door, and the T S Eliot Prizein 2004 for Reel. His last two books, including 2013's Bad Machine, have also been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. He has been translating poetry and fiction from the Hungarian since 1984 when he first returned to Hungary.
Silent House by Orhan Pamuk, translated from the Turkish by Robert Finn
Orhan Pamuk, is the author of many celebrated books, including The White Castle, Istanbul and Snow. In 2003 he won the International IMPAC Award for My Name is Red, and in 2006 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Museum of Innocence, was an international bestseller, praised in the Guardian as 'an enthralling, immensely enjoyable piece of storytelling', while Silent House was shortlist for the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize. Orhan Pamuk lives in Istanbul.
Ambassador Robert Finn is the author of the book The Early Turkish Novel, which has been published both in English and Turkish. His poems and translations have appeared in the United States, Turkey, France and Pakistan. The University of Texas press published his translation of the Turkish author Nazli Eray's novel, Orpheus in 2006. Syracuse University Press will publish his translation of Eray's The Emperor Tea Garden in 2013 and he is currently translating her novel Halfeti's Black Rose. He co-edited Building State and Security in Afghanistan. He has translated Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk's The Silent House and is now completing the translation of Pamuk's Cevdet Bey and Sons.
The Detour by Gerrband Bakker, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer
Gerbrand Bakker worked as a subtitler for nature films before becoming a gardener. His debut novel The Twin won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and will soon be made into a film.
David Colmer is an Australian writer and translator who lives in Amsterdam. He is the author of a novel and a collection of short stories, both published in Dutch translation in the Netherlands. His is the translator of more than twenty books: novels, children's literature and poetry. He is a four-time winner of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize and won the 2009 Biennial NSW Premier and PEN Translation Prize for his body of work. In 2010 his translation of Gerrband Bakker's The Twin won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
The Fall of the Stone City by Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson
Born in 1936, Ismail Kadare is Albania's best-known poet and novelist. Translations of his novels have appeared in more than 40 countries. In 2005 he was awarded the first Man Booker International Prize for 'a body of work written by an author who has had a truly global impact'. He is the recipient of the highly prestigious 2009 Principe de Asturias de las Letras in Spain.
John Hodgson studied English at Cambridge and Newcastle and has taught at universties in Kosovo and Albania. He has also translated The Three-Arched Bridge and The Accident by Ismail Kadare.
The Last of the Vostyachs by Diego Marani, translated from the Italian by Judith Landry
Diego Marani was born in Ferrara in 1959. He is a policy officer of the European Commission and lives in Brussels with his wife and two children. He has invented his own European language, Europorita and has published seven novels in Italian including the prize winning New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs.
Judith Landry got a first in French and Italian from Somerville College, Oxford. Her translations include three novels by Diego Marani including New Finnish Grammar, which won the 2012 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and was also shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
The Murder of Halland by Pia Juul, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken
Pia Juul, born 1962, claims her place as on of Denmarks' foremost literary authors. She has published five books of poetry, two short story collections and two novels. She is a member of the prestigious Danish Literary Academy. With sharp dialogue, finesse and humour bordering on the absurd, Juul has carved out a niche of her own in Scandinavian literature.The Murder of Halland was published in Danish in 2009 and is celebrated to huge critical acclaim as the renewal of the Danish crime novel. The novel has won Denmark's most important literary prize, Den Danske Banks litteraturpris. Juul is also the translator of Ali Smith, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and Alain de Botton into Danish.
Martin Aitken was born in 1961 and holds PhD in Linguistics. He gave up university tenure in 2008 to translate literature and listen to The Fall. His work has appeared in book form (to date, seven titles published in Danish and English) as well as in countless literary journals and periodicals, including AGNI, New Letters, Apparatur, Ecotone, The Literary Review, A Public Space and the Boston Review. Translated works include titles by Jørgen Leth, Pia Juul, Per Kirkeby, and Peter Høeg. He lives and works in rurual Denmark.
The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
Juan Gabriel Vasquez was born in Bogotá in 1973. He studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne and has translated works by E M Forster and Victor Hugo into Spanish. He was nominated as one of the Bogotá 39, South America's most promising writers of the new generation. His novel The Informers was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
Anne McLean has translated Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs and other writings by authors including Hector Abad, Carmen Martín Gaite, Julio Cortázar, Ignacio Martíner de Pisón, Enrique Vila-Matas and Tomás Eloy Martínez. She has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize twice, for Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas in 2004 and for The Armies by Evelio Rosero in 2009.
Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia
Andrés Neuman is novelist, poet, translator, journalist and clomunist. He was born in 1977 in Buenos Aires, but emigrated to Spain with his parents as a child. He now lives in Granada. He has a degree in Spanish philosophy from the University of Granada and has taught Latin American literature. Neuman published his first novel, Bariloch, at 22 and has since published further novels, several collections of short stories and poetry. He was named as one of Hay Festival's the Bogotá 39 and Granta has described him as one of the 22 best young Spanish-language novelists.
Nick Caistor is a translator, journalist and author. He has translated over forty books from Spanish and Portuguese, including works by José Saramago and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.
Lorenza Garcia has lived for extended periods in Spain, France and Iceland. Since 2007 she has translated over a dozen novels and works of non-fiction from French and Spanish.
Trieste by Daša Drndic, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac
Daša Drndic is a distinguished Croatian novelist, playwright and literary critic, born in Zagreb in 1946. She spent some years teaching in Canada and gained an MA in Theatre and Communication as part of the Fulbright Programme.
Ellen Elias-Bursac has been translating novels, stories and nonfiction by Bosnian, Coratian, and Serbian writers for last twenty years. She has translated three books of David Albahari's writing: Words Are Something Else, which was awarded the AATSEEL Award in 1998 for best translation from a Slavic or East European language, Gotz and Meyer which was awarded the National Translation Award by the American Literary Translation Association in 2006 and Snow Man. She has also written a study on poet Tin Ujevic and his work as a literary translator.
Judges
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Jean Boase-BeierAcademicJean Boase-Beier is Professor of Literature and Translation at the University of East Anglia. She is a translator from German, and editor of Visible Poets, a series of bilingual poetry books, for Arc Publications. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the British Comparative Literature Association, and a former member of the Translators Association Committee and the Advisory Panel of the British Centre for Literary Translation. Jean Boase-Beier's academic work focuses particularly on the translation of literary style; recent academic works include Stylistic Approaches to Translation (2006) and A Critical Introduction to Translation Studies (2011).
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Gabriel JosipoviciAuthor and criticGabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 of Russo-Italian, Romano-Levantine parents. He lived in Egypt from 1945 to 1956, when he came to England. He read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and in 1963 joined the newly-formed University of Sussex as Lecturer in English in the School of European Studies. He remained at Sussex until 1998, when he took early retirement. He is the author of 18 novels, three volumes of stories, eight critical books, and a memoir of his mother, the poet and translator Sacha Rabinovitch. His plays have been performed on the stage and on radio, and he is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. His most recent novel, Infinity: The Story of a Moment, came out in May earlier this year.
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Elif ShafakAuthorElif Shafak is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read woman writer in Turkey. Critics have called her one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literature in both Turkish and English. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages and she was awarded the honorary distinction of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.
Shafak has published 12 books, eight of which are novels. She writes fiction in both Turkish and English. Shafak blends Western and Eastern traditions of storytelling, bringing out the myriad stories of women, minorities, immigrants, subcultures, youth and global souls. Her work draws on diverse cultures and literary traditions, as well as deep interest in history, philosophy, Sufism, oral culture, and cultural politics. She also has a keen eye for black humour. Her novels include The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love, and The Honour, which was published in April 2012 by Penguin. She has a column in a major Turkish newspaper and contributes to newspapers and magazines around the world, including The New York Times, the Guardian and Corriere della Serra.
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Boyd TonkinLiterary editorBoyd Tonkin is Literary Editor of The Independent. He studied English and French literature at the University of Cambridge and taught literature in higher and adult education before becoming an award-winning magazine journalist, as feature writer and features editor of the magazine for social services professionals, Community Care. Already a freelance writer for the Observer, he became Social Policy Editor of the New Statesman, and then Literary Editor, before moving to the The Independent.
He has reported on literary and artistic issues from more than 20 countries on four continents, and his cultural essays have been published widely in books and journals in the UK and abroad. In addition to judging the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize since 2000, he has judged the Man Booker Prize, the Whitbread Biography Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the David Cohen Prize for Literature and in 2010, the Prix Cevennes in France.
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Frank WynneTranslatorFrank Wynne is a literary translator. Born in Ireland, he moved to France in 1984, where he discovered a passion for language. He worked as a bookseller in Paris and again when he moved to London in 1987, he translated and published comics and graphic novels and from 1996-2001 he worked in online media. He began translating literature in the late 1990s, and in 2001 decided to devote himself to this full time. Early translated works included Atomised by Michel Houellebecq, which won the 2002 IMPAC Prize and Windows on the World by Frédéric Beigbeder, which won the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. He has spent much of the past decade living in Central and South America, and five years ago began to translate Hispanic fiction. Authors he has translated include Ahmadou Kourouma, Boualem Sansal, Claude Lanzmann, Tómas Eloy Martínez and Almudena Grandes. He won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for French translation in 2008, and the Valle Inclán Prize for Spanish translation in 2012 for his translation of Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras. In recent years he has taken part in translation events at the Hay Festival, the Edinburgh Book Festival and Norwich Showcase and has contributed translations to The Paris Review, Beirut 39 and Index on Censorship. In September 2012, he was made Honorary Member of the Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Association. His most recent published translation is The Blue Hour by Alonso Cueto. He is currently based in London.
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