The novel "Seven Houses in France" among the nominees for best Foreign Fiction book of 2011

2012-03-09 ¦ Prizes

Booktrust has just released its list of the 15 works of fiction nominated for "Foreign Fiction Prize". This prize is one of the most widely recognized prizes for non-English fiction, and for the first time a novel originally written in Basque —Bernardo Atxaga's "Seven Houses in France"— has made the list.

British newspaper The Independent began awarding in 1990 the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for the best work of fiction written in a foreign language. Since then, the prize is awarded every April for the best book of foreign contemporary fiction from the previous year.

The prizes are now administered by Booktrust, who released this morning the longlist of works nominated for the 2012 prize.

The publication of this year's longlist brings good news for Basque literature, as this is the first time that a work of fiction originally written in Basque —Bernardo Atxaga's latest novel, Seven Houses in France— has been nominated. The English version of the novel has been very well received in the UK since its publication last November.

The novel is currently on the longlist of 15 titles (representing 13 different languages). The shortlist of the five finalists for the prize will be released on April 12th.

Here are this year’s nominees:

1Q84: Books 1 and 2 by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin (Harvill Secker)
Alice by Judith Hermann, translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo (The Clerkenwell Press)
Blooms of Darkness by Aharon Appelfeld, translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green (Alma Books)
Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by Cindy Carter (Corsair)
The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg, translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death (Faber & Faber)
From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb (Telegram Books)
Hate: A Romance by Tristan Garcia, translated from the French by Marion Duvert and Lorin Stein (Faber & Faber)
New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani, translated from the Italian by Judith Landry (Dedalus)
Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki, translated from the German by Anthea Bell (Peirene Press)
Parrallel Stories by Peter Nadas, translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein (Jonathan Cape)
Please Look After Mother by Kyung-sook Shin, translated from the Korean by Shin Chi-Young Kim (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon (Harvill Secker)
Professor Andersen's Night by Dag Solstad, translated from the Norwegian by Agnes Scott Langeland (Harvill Secker)
Scenes From Village Life by Amos Oz, translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas De Lange (Chatto & Windus)
Seven Houses in France by Bernardo Atxaga, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (Harvill Secker)

The complete list of nominees and winners from previous years are on Wikipedia.