Another day, another fiction prize longlist.  Are you getting tired of my posting these?  For me they’ve been a great (and easy) resource for books that have been translated into English, as well as what’s been going on in foreign fic in general, over the past year that it seemed a shame not to share information.

This particular list of 15 books was published on March 9th.  The Independent is a UK newspaper.  Its Foreign Fiction Prize has been around since 2001 and was designed “to honor contemporary fiction in translation in the United Kingdom”.  I learned about it from SavidgeReads & GavReads on The Readers podcast.  What got my attention was the inclusion of two books I missed from the Best Translated Book Award – Sjón From the Mouth of the Whale and Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery.  (To be fair, I don’t think the Sjón novel was published in the U.S.).

• Blooms of Darkness by Aharon Appelfed (translated from Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green)
• Seven Houses in France by Bernardo Atxaga (translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa)
• The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco (translated from Italian by Richard Dixon)
• Hate: a romance byTristan Garcia (translated from French by Marion Duvert & Lorin Stein)
• Alice by Judith Hermann (translated from German by Margot Bettauer Dembo)
• New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani (translated from Italian by Judith Landry)
• 1Q84: Books 1 & 2 by Haruki Murakami (translated from Japanese by Jay Rubin)
• Parallel Stories by Peter Nadas (translated from Hungarian by Imre Goldstein)
• Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz (translated from Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange)
• Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki (translated from German by Anthea Bell)
• The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg (translated from Swedish by Sarah Death)
• Please Look After Mother by Kyung-sook Shin(translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim)
• From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón (translated from Icelandic by Victoria Cribb)
• Professor Andersen’s Night by Dag Solstad (translated from Norwegian by Agnes Scott Langeland)
• Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke (translated from Chinese by Cindy Carter)

I keep hearing good things about New Finnish Grammar, so that’s one that will definitely be going on my TBR list.  Have you read any of the longlist-ers that you recommend (or not)?