IFFP 2015 – Two Shortlists (and more besides…)

As regular readers will no doubt be aware, the shortlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize was announced earlier this week, with six books remaining from the fifteen longlisted selections.  Before that, though, the intrepid members of the Shadow Panel had also whittled down the choices to an even half-dozen (although, of course, we were dealing with sixteen of the best…).  Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the American equivalent, the Best Translated Book Award, was just getting started, with a twenty-five-strong quality-packed longlist.  But let’s leave that for later – back to the IFFP…

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The official shortlist saw most of the obvious also-rans leave the field, but I wouldn’t say that the final six were all obvious choices.  Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days was a given, and the Murakami was always likely to attract a lot of love.  It was also great to see indie publishers well represented.  By Night the Mountain Burns is now both the first long- and short-listed book for And Other Stories while the inclusion of In the Beginning Was the Sea and While the Gods Were Sleeping meant Pushkin Press were the only publishers with two shortlisted titles.  The only one of the six I wasn’t too impressed with was Daniel Kehlmann’s F – it’s certainly got its backers, but I’m not one of them (as you’ll see when my review is eventually posted…).

It will come as no surprise that there was little overlap with the Shadow Panel’s selections; in fact, only the Erpenbeck and Murakami titles appeared on both lists.  The alternative shortlist was rounded out by Hamid Ismailov’s The Dead Lake (yet another Peirene Press title we thought worthy of progression), Marcello Fois’ Bloodlines (an excellent story of a Sardinian family’s tribulations through time), Tomas Bannerhed’s wonderful debut novel The Ravens (describing a young boy’s childhood and his father’s struggles with depression) and…

…Mathias Énard‘s Zone!  Having called in this book, we were always likely to move it on to the shortlist, but it’s not only Stu and myself who have enjoyed it.  All the other shadow judges who have tried it so far have agreed with us – I wonder why the ‘real judges’ didn’t…

Once again, I much prefer our list to the official one (even if, personally, I’d have loved us to select the Erwin Mortier book), but this year has given us more of an insight into the nature of prize judging.  With a record eleven bloggers shadowing the prize, things have gone very differently this year, and where in the past one or two people have had a disproportionate influence over proceedings, this time around we’ve all had to be content to see books we loved fall by the wayside (Joe has touched upon this in his round-up of the Shadow proceedings).

Which is not to say that we sympathise with the real judges completely…  At the Booktrust site, the panel chair, Boyd Tonkin, wrote:

“I’m delighted by the diversity, the originality and the reader-friendly accessibility of this year’s shortlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.”

Now that’s a comment which gave us all pause for thought – is ‘reader-friendly accessibility’ really what we’re striving for here?  Immediately, memories of the great Booker controversy come swimming back, a storm in a teacup which ended up spawning the Folio Prize in its wake.  Of course, for lovers of fiction in translation, if it’s a more serious approach you want, you only have to switch your focus across the pond…

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All of which brings me to the BTBA longlist – not quite as large as the notorious IMPAC Prize selection, but still pretty lengthy 😉  The initial impression for me, having concentrated on the IFFP list for so long, was the rather surprising omission of The End of Days, a book with a writer, a translator (Susan Bernofsky) and a publisher (New Directions) made for these events.  Still, even without that novel (and a couple of other hot tips), the eventual longlist was still a fascinating one.

I won’t go through the whole list here (please click through to the official page for that), but it’s full of great books, many of which were already on my radar.  I’ve read five so far (Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd, Andrés Neuman’s Talking to Ourselves, Marcos Giralt Torrente’s Paris and Can Xue’s The Last Lover), and I’m hoping to get to Énard‘s Street of Thieves very soon too.  The list has a fascinating mix of titles, and it just goes to show that when your aim is to choose the best piece of fiction in translation available, and when you go out of your way to consider books (and, of course, when ‘reader-friendly accessibility’ is not really a priority…), you actually can come up with a decent longlist.  I hope the appropriate people are listening…

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So, after much rambling, it’s time to get back to work, reading and reviewing, hoping to stumble across another gem of fiction in translation.  Having finished all the IFFP books now, I just need to finish off the reviews before it’s time to start discussing the winner (and I might even find the time to partially reread a couple of the titles).  It’s not easy, this panel lark, but it can be rewarding too…

…well, as long as you do it the right way, that is 😉