Pamuk, Le Clézio and Bolaño battle for translation prize Nobel prizewinners are in the running for the title of best translated book
Alison Flood, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 6 January 2010

Left - Translation prize: the writer Orhan Pamuk and his translator Maureen Freely are in the running for his latest novel, The Museum of Innocence. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Nobel prize winners Orhan Pamuk and JMG Le Clézio are going head to head with last year's hottest translated author Roberto Bolaño for the title of 2010 best translated book.

The prize, set up in 2007 to combat the lack of translated titles on "best of the year" lists, is run by the international literature website Three Percent, part of New York's University of Rochester. Pamuk makes the line-up for his latest novel The Museum of Innocence, an Istanbul-set account of an obsessive love affair translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely, while Le Clézio was picked by judges for his novel Desert, an epic story of a North African desert tribe and its descendents translated from the French by C Dickson. Bolaño was selected for The Skating Rink, a short novel about a beautiful figure skating champion translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews.

The longlist of 25 was announced yesterday, featuring authors from 23 different countries writing in 17 different languages. Charlotte Roche's bestselling German novel Wetlands, which received considerable attention for its sexually frank descriptions, failed to make the cut, as did Jonathan Littell's Goncourt-winner The Kindly Ones and Evelio Rosero's The Armies, which took the Independent's foreign fiction prize in May.

"None of these came very close to making the cut - rightly so, in my opinion," blogged Michael Orthofer of the Complete Review, one of the judges for the prize. Orthofer also noted that only one title on the 25-strong list was published by a major publisher – Pamuk's novel, published by Knopf – with the rest of the books from independent publishers or university presses. "Great to see, in a way - but also disturbing, as it suggests the majors have just abandoned the field of interesting fiction in translation," he said.

From 11 January, Three Percent – named for the fact that just 3% of books published in the US are works in translation – will highlight a title a day from the longlist, with the finalists to be revealed on 16 February. The award, which claims to be the only one of its kind, is open to original translations which have not previously been published in the US, and is intended to reward the quality of the work as well as the quality of the translation.

Last year's prize was won by Attila Bartis's Tranquility, translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein. Bartis's novel tells of a writer who lives with his house-bound mother, a former actress.

To read the longlist in full link here to The Guardian online.