BANNED SYRIAN NOVELIST ON LONGLIST FOR THE INDEPENDENT FOREIGN FICTION PRIZE 2013

Four from Harvill Secker, including Laurent Binet’s HHhH, also make list

Khaled Khalifa’s In Praise of Hatred, banned in Syria, has made the longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2013. The book – published secretly in Damascus and banned forty days later – was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008. Set in and around 1980s Aleppo, the story unpicks a life lived under dictatorship and loudly echoes the violence across the Middle East and the Arab world over the past two years. The translation into English by Leri Price is joined on the 16-strong longlist by Orhan Pamuk – who won the first Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1990 and has subsequently been shortlisted twice – and Ismail Kadare, who won the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005.

The longlist also features Diego Marani, one of Italy’s leading contemporary authors, who was shortlisted for this Prize last year with New Finnish Grammar. Independent publishers are well represented with 11 different houses represented on the list. Harvill Secker also have a bumper year taking four of the slots, and finally Transworld with one. Translator Anne McLean appears twice for her work on The Sound of Things Falling, by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas, on which she collaborated with Rosalind Harvey. The longlist features books translated from 13 different languages including Croatian, Norwegian, Hungarian, and Afrikaans.

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is awarded annually to the best work of contemporary fiction in translation. The Prize celebrates an exceptional work of fiction by a living author which has been translated into English from any other language and published in the United Kingdom in 2012. Uniquely, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize acknowledges both the writer and the translator equally, recognising the importance of the translator in their ability to bridge the gap between languages and cultures.

A total of 16 contenders have been longlisted for the 2013 Prize, worth £10,000. They are:

 A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Harvill Secker)

Black Bazaar by Alain Mabanckou, translated from the French by Sarah Ardizonne (Serpent’s Tail)

 Bundu by Chris Barnard, translated from the Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns (Alma Books)

Cold Sea Stories by Pawel Huelle, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Comma Press)

 Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean (Harvill Secker)

HHhH by Laurent Binet, translated from the French by Sam Taylor (Harvill Secker)

In Praise of Hatred by Khalid Khalifa, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price (Transworld)

The Detour by Gerrband Bakker, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer (Harvill Secker)

The Last of the Vostyachs by Diego Marani, translated from the Italian by Judith Landry (Dedalus)

The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean (Bloomsbury)

Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia (Pushkin Press)

Trieste by Dasa Drndic, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac (Maclehose Press)

 Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahovkai, translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes (Tuskar Rock)

Silent House by Orhan Pamuk, translated from the Turkish by Robert Finn (Faber & Faber)

The Fall of the Stone City by Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson (Canongate)

The Murder of Halland by Pia Juul, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (Peirene Press)

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize ran previously between 1990 and 1995 and the Prize was revived with the support of Arts Council England in 2001. The £10,000 Prize money and associated costs are funded by Arts Council England who manage the Prize in partnership with Booktrust. The Prize is also supported by the Independent and Champagne Taittinger.

Previous winners of the Prize include Milan Kundera in 1991 for Immortality translated by Peter Kussi; W.G. Sebald and translator, Anthea Bell, in 2002 for Austerlitz; and Per Petterson and translator, Anne Born, in 2006 for Out Stealing Horses. The 2012 winner was Blooms of Darkness by the Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld, translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M Green. 

A shortlist of six books will be announced on Thursday 11 April and the overall winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2013 will be announced at an awards ceremony in central London in May at the Royal Institute of British Architects. 

The judges for this year’s Prize are:

• Jean Boase-Beier, Professor of Literature and Translation at the University of East Anglia
• Novelist and former Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex, Gabriel Josipovici
• Elif Shafak, an award-winning novelist and the most widely read woman writer in Turkey
• Literary translator, Frank Wynne
• Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor of the Independent