The Bookseller.com

5th December 2008

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Indy foreign fiction prize longlist

25.01.08

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist – selected from almost 100 submissions of translated fiction by living authors published in the UK during 2007 – teems with wonders and delights, notes the newspaper.

It stretches from Alaa Al-Aswany's Cairo apartment block and the tangled lives of its tenants to Laura Restrepo's Colombian family in the coke-fuelled heyday of Pablo Escobar; from the history-haunted South African farmstead of Marlene van Niekerk (writing in Afrikaans) to the occupied Palestinian town of Sayed Kashua (writing in Hebrew); from the nuclear scientists and stormtroopers of 1930s Berlin, in Paul Verhaeghen's Omega Minor, to the hilarious but sinister collapse of Communism into capitalism in the Slovakia of Peter Pist'anek's Rivers of Babylon.

The longlist 

Alaa Al-Aswany, The Yacoubian Building (translated by Humphrey Davies from the Arabic, and published by Fourth Estate)

Bi Feiyu, The Moon Opera (Howard Goldblatt; Chinese; Telegram)

Lars Saabye Christensen, The Model (Don Bartlett; Norwegian; Arcadia)

Jenny Erpenbeck, The Book of Words (Susan Bernofsky; German; Portobello)

Pawel Huelle, Castorp (Antonia Lloyd-Jones; Polish; Serpent's Tail)

Ismail Kadare, Agamemnon's Daughter (David Bellos; French; Canongate)

Sayed Kashua, Let It Be Morning (Miriam Shlesinger; Hebrew; Atlantic)

Daniel Kehlmann, Measuring the World (Carol Brown Janeway; German; Quercus)

Erwin Mortier, Shutterspeed (Ina Rilke; Dutch; Harvill Secker)

Marlene van Niekerk, The Way of the Women (Michiel Heyns; Afrikaans; Little, Brown)

Bengt Ohlsson, Gregorius (Silvester Mazzarella; Swedish; Portobello)

Alan Pauls, The Past (Nick Caistor; Spanish; Harvill Secker)

Peter Pist'anek, Rivers of Babylon (Peter Petro; Slovak; Garnett Press)

Laura Restrepo, Delirium (Natasha Wimmer; Spanish; Harvill Secker)

Yasmina Traboulsi, Bahia Blues (Polly McLean; French; Arcadia)

Paul Verhaeghen, Omega Minor (the author; Dutch; Dalkey Archive Press)

Enrique Vila-Matas, Montano (Jonathan Dunne; Spanish; Harvill Secker)

Independent

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Prize