Independent Foreign Fiction Prize long-list

Boyd Tonkin, one of the judges of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, writes that he and his colleagues have mined "a year's harvest of newly-translated works of fiction stretches in language from Turkish to Gikuyu to Norwegian; in setting, from the mountain villages of Tibet to a mysterious Greek island to the crumbling mansions of Havana; and in authorship, from a young French sensation to a Dutch-exiled Iranian refugee to a Portuguese Nobel literature laureate."

Their long-list:

Kader Abdolah, My Father's Notebook (translated by Susan Massotty from Dutch; Canongate)

José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons (Daniel Hahn; Portuguese; Arcadia)

Niccolò Ammaniti, Steal You Away (Jonathan Hunt; Italian; Canongate)

Javier Cercas, The Speed of Light (Anne McLean; Spanish; Bloomsbury)

Edgardo Cozarinsky, The Moldavian Pimp (Nick Caistor; Spanish; Harvill Secker)

Per Olov Enquist, The Story of Blanche and Marie (Tiina Nunnally; Swedish; Harvill Secker)

Jenny Erpenbeck, The Old Child (Susan Bernofsky; German; Portobello)

Faïza Guène, Just Like Tomorrow (Sarah Adams; French; Chatto & Windus)

Vangelis Hatziyannidis, Four Walls (Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife; Greek; Marion Boyars)

Ismail Kadare, The Successor (David Bellos; French; Canongate)

Ma Jian, Stick out your Tongue (Flora Drew; Chinese; Chatto & Windus)

Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream (Margaret Jull Costa; Spanish; Chatto & Windus)

Eva Menasse, Vienna (Anthea Bell; German; Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Wizard of the Crow (the author; Gikuyu; Harvill Secker)

Leonardo Padura, Havana Black (Peter Bush; Spanish; Bitter Lemon)

Atiq Rahimi, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear (Sarah Maguire & Yama Yari; Dari; Chatto & Windus)

José Saramago, Seeing (Margaret Jull Costa; Portuguese; Harvill Secker)

Elif Shafak, The Gaze (Brendan Freely; Turkish; Marion Boyars)

Dag Solstad, Shyness and Dignity (Sverre Lyngstad; Norwegian; Harvill Secker)

Linn Ullmann, Grace (Barbara Haveland; Norwegian; Picador)

In March the judges will choose a short-list, and the winner will be announced at the start of May.

--Marshal Zeringue