Saramago Dies

Dutch Gardener Wins IMPAC

The IMPAC Dublin Prize, the world's richest literary award, has been won by Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker with his debut novel The Twin.

The synopsis of the novel reads :

When Helmer’s twin brother dies in a car accident, he is obliged to return to the small family farm. He resigns himself to taking over his brother’s role and spending the rest of his days ‘with his head under a cow’.

After his old, worn-out father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets about furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferences. The Twin is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies.

The panel of judges, which this year included Anne Fine, commented :

Though rich in detail, it’s a sparely written story, with the narrator’s odd small cruelties, laconic humour and surprising tendernesses emerging through a steady, well-paced, unaffected style. ... The book convinces from first page to last. With quiet mastery the story draws in the reader. The writing is wonderful: restrained and clear, and studded with detail of farm rhythms in the cold, damp Dutch countryside. The author excels at dialogue, and Helmer’s inner story-telling voice also comes over perfectly as he begins to change everything around him. There are intriguing ambiguities, but no false notes. Nothing and no one is predictable, and yet we believe in them all: the regular tanker driver, the next door neighbour with her two bouncing children, and Jaap, the old farm labourer from the twins’ childhood who comes back to the farm in time for the last great upheaval, as Helmer finally takes charge of what is left of his own life.

According to Alison Flood in The Guardian, Bakkar got the idea for the book while he was hiking in the mountains of Corsica in 2002.  He said he had the idea of a son :

who was going to do something terrible to his father. ... It stayed in my mind for months and I got so frustrated – nothing was happening with the idea. Then I just sat down and got writing. I didn't know where I was going, I just started – for me that's a good way to write.

Bakkar is a gardener by trade and says that writing and gardening :

... work well together. In the autumn when I rake the dead leaves I can do it for hours – once I even disturbed a pile I'd made so I could go on raking. The sound is so wonderful: it lets you think in a subconscious way, in the back of your mind. 

Bakker also works as a skating instructor in the winter.

Link with Harlequin

More in Starmag today on the move by KarnaDya Solutions Sdn Bhd to bring chick lit into the Malay for a local readership. Dzireena Mahadzir discovers that the company is linking up with Harlequin (the world's biggest publisher of "women's fiction" - most usually romances) to translate titles from its Red Dress Ink imprint.

KarnaDya are targeting the youth market and, says marketing mananger Faiz Al-Shahab (left) :

... even though the culture and lifestyle in the books will be different from that of local publications, the plots and story lines will be entertaining to Malay readers. In terms of the storylines, I think Red Dress Ink offers more interesting content compared to local novels. From our experience in Malay fiction, it should be suitable for the local mindsets and tastes.

Dzireena isn't too impressed with the titles she picks up, though :

I found the language a bit stiff and writing didn’t flow very well. Some parts sounded like they were direct translations from English to Bahasa.

More International Chic Literature in BM?

I'm laughing because Literary Saloon on the other side of the world picked up a Malaysian publishing story before I did!

Bernama reports that more international chic literature will be translated into Bahasa Malaysia to cater for female Bahasa Malaysia medium readers. The company behind the move, apparently, - KaryaDya Publication Sdn Bhd.

I'm really happy to see more books from elsewhere translated into BM as readers deserve a wider choice of reading materials, and a little competition for local purveyors of popular fiction should help to raise standards. Should. It'll be interesting to see what actually does happen.

So ... what do you think, and what would you like to see translated for the BM reading market?

Novels with IMPAC

The shortlist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award has been announced :

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
Ravel by Jean Echenoz
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
The Archivist’s Story by Travis Holland
The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles by Roy Jacobsen
The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt
Animal’s People by Indra Sinha
Man Gone Down by Micheal Thomas

The Award is presented annually with the objective of promoting excellence in world literature. It is open to novels written in any language and by authors of any nationality, provided the work has been published in English or English translation. This year just two of the novels are works in translation - Roy Jacobsen's novel is from the original Norwegian, and Jean Echenoz writes in French.

The overall winner will be announced on June 11th.

Newspaper Miscellany

A hodge-podge of loosely connected things linked only by their appearance in Malaysian newspapers ...

Malaysian P.M. Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi launches a fantasy novel written by 13 year old Adam Umemoto who happens to be his nephew.

Of course the occasion was used to get in a political soundbite ... Resolve the Language Issue Before it Gets Out of Hand. (We learn nothing here about the young author or his book which is a pity.)

Out of hand the language issue has already got, methinks, and I agree with the Education Minister Datuk Seri Hishamuddin Hussein* : why bring up the issue 6 years after the policy was formulated? - after teachers have been trained and are working hard to make it a success, after textbooks have been written, and after the kids have proved they are coping with it?

I've seen this effort at the ground level (in teacher-training, in schools across the country) and it makes me very sad indeed that there are those intent on pulling it apart again.

National Laureate A. Samad Said was among those handing over a memorandum to the palace. (You can also watch a video at ChannelNews Asia - and there is some very good comment at Another Brick in the Wall.)

Enough.

Let me move on to things much happier.

It's International Women's Day today and in Starmag Amy de Kanter offers an eclectic list of women writers who :

write about loving, laughing and living large ...

A bilingual book of Malaysian/German fairytales, is to be launched at the KL International bookfair in August, tentatively titled Kisah Dongeng dan Cerita Rakyat Malaysia dan German. It will be the fourth collaboration between the National Translation Institute (ITNMB) and Goethe-Institut Malaysia.

Also, the National Library currently has an exhibition promoting the literary works of Finland, which features the book covers of Finnish literary works that have been translated. The photo (right) shows deputy head of mission of the Finnish Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, Henna Knuuttila, handing a copy of Kalevala, a national epic which has been translated into 60 languages to National Library director-general Raslin Abu Bakar at the launch.

Featured are literary works which feature current issues and daily life, there are children’s books, poems and fantasy stories. The literary works depict contemporary culture and recent times including the works of author Sofi Oksanen, who wrote about Estonia after World War II.

Said Knuuttila :

Finnish works have been translated to languages like French, German, Russian, Chinese and English. With this exhibition, people will get an idea of the works, get interested and look for more information. Finnish is not widely spoken so the translations are very important for us.

The exhibition will be held until March 31 at the library. Shall we organise a Bibliobibuli field-trip?

(* Oh goodness, what's happening to me? I am agreeing with government policy. Checks forehead for signs of fever.)

Postscript :

Have been caught up reading other views on the subject - Rocky links some very good posts. I also like what Ungku Aziz has to say about bilingual education.

Exciting Times for Ezra

Our vision is to provide a balance of new and exciting titles while not forgetting the classics that have shaped our understanding and experience of the world. ... Now, more than ever, we find that there is an appetite for innovative, alternative ideas that challenge the mainstream ... We publish fiction and nonfiction, in both English and Malay. That said, we feel that there is great potential in the nonfiction market for both languages, especially for the Malay-language audience. Currently, the Malay-reading public doesn’t truly have the option of reading Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat, Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist or Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly, so the translation market is something that we’re going into aggressively.

Dynamic young publisher (though he describes himself, self-effacingly as "still wet behind the ears") Ezra Zaid of ZI Publications is interviewed by Eric Forbes in Readsmonthly supplement of Starmag today and maps out his exciting future plans.

The New Anglo World Order

You may remember that back in October Horace Engdahl of the Nobel prize committee controversially declared :

... you can't get away from the fact that Europe is still the centre of the literary world ... not the United States. The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature ... That ignorance is restraining.

In the New Statesman [via] philosopher and writer Jonathan Derbyshire responds with an article discussing The Rise of the New Anglo-World Order, which you can also hear broadcast. He finds that :

The real cause of Engdahl's angst ... is that what he called the "big dialogue of literature" is today actually being conducted mostly in English - by inhabitants of Britain's former colonies, for instance, especially those in south Asia and the Caribbean; and also by non-anglophone writers who have followed Conrad and Nabokov in choosing to write in English.

Win 1,001 Nights with 1,001 Words

Preeta spotted this competition at Abebooks and reckons some of you will probably want to give it a go. (Please note though it is only open to UK Residents - a fact I overlooked when I posted this up yesterday.) :

Penguin has worked their magic on The Arabian Nights, and AbeBooks.co.uk has a very special competition prize for one lucky booklover - one of the just-released 3,000 special limited edition box-sets of The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights - to give away.

To stand a chance of winning, simply write us a short story. Anyone can enter, child or adult. All you have to do is let your imagination flow and you could win. It can be about anything - fiction or non-fiction - but must be exactly 1,001 words in length (not including title). Oh yeah... don't be boring. Scheherazade kept herself alive with 1,001 entertaining tales and we're looking for short stories that share the same adventurous spirit as The Arabian Nights. The most entertaining 1,001 word story will win.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in the Telegraph says of this new edition :

For anyone who wishes to enter the labyrinth of the original stories, however, there is no better gateway than Malcolm Lyons’s new translation. It may take up three fat volumes, but hardly a word is wasted in this outstanding combination of storytelling and scholarship.

The Forest of Paradoxes

... literature has become a way for the men and women in our time to express their identity, to claim their right to speak, and to be heard in all their diversity. Without their voices, their call, we would live in a world of silence. ...

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature gives his lecture, speaking of his own influences and the global importance of literature in translation.

[Found via the Literary Saloon]

Bali Photos (2)

Remember Camilla Gibb who was in KL last year for the literary festival? Well her novel Sweetness in the Belly which many of you have enjoyed has now been translated into Bahasa Indonesia with the title Lilly : Pencarian Cinta Seorang Gadis Eropa di Etiopia. Wouldn't it be nice to have a Bahasa Malaysia version for the local market??

Pakistani author Moni Mohsin now lives in London, and her debut novel The End of Innocence was published in 2006. Really enjoyed talking to her at the dinner at Karim Razlan's house.

The last session on the last day was defintely one of the best. Deepika Shetty was in conversation with Mexican master of magical realism Alberto Ruy Sanchez. It is impossible to listen to him and not fall in love.

Guess what? Bernice discovered that he will be stopping over in KL next week and plans to get him to do a reading. (More news about this later when it's fixed up.)

And here's our Bernice between sessions.

Ignorant and Insular?

The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining. ...Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world ... not the United States ... what I said expresses a conviction resulting from more than 10 years of assiduous labour.

Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy (which awards the Nobel prizes), Horace Engdahl, who is also a professor of Scandinavian literature and a literary critic.

The prize for literature is to be awarded within the next few weeks, and of course the bets are on :

Ladbrokes' frontrunner is currently the Italian scholar Claudio Magris, who is 3/1 favourite to take the SEK10m prize, trailed by the Syrian poet Adonis at 4/1. Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth are the highest placed Americans, at 7/1, while Don DeLillo is at 10/1 and Thomas Pynchon at 20/1; Ladbrokes is also offering 40/1 odds on the generally reclusive Pynchon both winning and attending the prize-giving on December 10.

Postscript :

You can't say something like this and get away with it!

John Litchfield collects some reactions from the other side of the Atlantic. Sam Leith posts an excellent rebuttal at the Telegraph. And see also this very balanced post at The Literary Saloon.

The 50 Best Translations

The Translators Association of the Society of Authors celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion they have compiled

... as a sampler, to provoke thought, and get people talking

a list of 50 outstanding translations of the last half century.

1. Raymond Queneau – Exercises in Style (Barbara Wright, 1958)

2. Primo Levi – If This is a Man (Stuart Woolf, 1959)

3. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa – The Leopard (Archibald Colquhoun, 1961)

4. Günter Grass – The Tin Drum (Ralph Manheim, 1962)

5. Jorge Luis Borges – Labyrinths (Donald Yates, James Irby, 1962)

6. Leonardo Sciascia – Day of the Owl (Archibald Colquhoun, 1963)

7. Alexander Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Ralph Parker, 1963)

8. Yukio Mishima – Death in Midsummer (Seidensticker, Keene, Morris, Sargent, 1965)

9. Naguib Mahfouz – Cairo Trilogy (Leila Vennewitz, 1965)

10. Octavio Paz – Labyrinth of Solitude (Lysander Kemp, 1967)

11. Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita (Michael Glenny, 1969)

12. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 100 Years of Solitude (Gregory Rabassa, 1970)

13. Walter Benjamin – Illuminations (Harry Zohn, 1970)

14. Paul Celan – Poems (Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton, 1972)

15. Bertolt Brecht – Poems (John Willett, Ralph Manheim, Erich Fried, et al 1976)

16. Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish (Alan Sheridan, 1977)

17. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie - Montaillou (Barbara Bray, 1978)

18. Italo Calvino – If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (William Weaver, 1981)

19. Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida (Richard Howard, 1981)

20. Christa Wolf – A Model Childhood (Ursule Molinaro, Hedwig Rappolt, 1982)

21. Umberto Eco – The Name of the Rose (William Weaver, 1983)

22. Mario Vargas Llosa – Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Helen R. Lane, 1983)

23. Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Michael Henry Heim, 1984)

24. Marguerite Duras – The Lover (Barbara Bray, 1985)

25. Josef Skvorecky – The Engineer of Human Souls (Paul Wilson, 1985)

26. Per Olov Enquist – The March of the Musicians (Joan Tate, 1985)

27. Patrick Süskind – Perfume (John E. Woods, 1986)

28. Isabel Allende – The House of the Spirits (Magda Bodin, 1986)

29. Georges Perec – Life A User’s Manual (David Bellos, 1987)

30. Thomas Bernhard – Cutting Timber (Ewald Osers, 1988)

31. Czeslaw Milosz – Poems (Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Hass, 1988)

32. José Saramago – Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (Giovanni Pontiero, 1992)

33. Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time (Terence Kilmartin, 1992)

34. Roberto Calasso – The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (Tim Parks, 1993)

35. Naguib Mahfouz – Cairo Trilogy (Olive E. Kenny, Lorne M. Kenny, Angela Botros Samaan, 1991-3)

36. Laura Esquivel – Like Water for Chocolate (Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen, 1993)

37. Bao Ninh – The Sorrow of War (Frank Palmos, Phan Thanh Hao, 1994)

38. Victor Klemperer – I Shall Bear Witness (Martin Chalmers, 1998)

39. Beowulf (Seamus Heaney, 1999)

40. Josef Brodsky – Collected Poems (Anthony Hecht et al, 2000)

41. Xingjian Gao – Soul Mountain (Mabel Lee, 2001)

42. Tahar Ben Jelloun – This Blinding Absence of Light (Linda Coverdale, 2002)

43. W.G. Sebald – Austerlitz (Anthea Bell, 2002)

44. Orhan Pamuk – Snow (Maureen Freely, 2004)

45. Amos Oz – A Tale of Love and Darkness (Nicholas de Lange, 2004)

46. Per Petterson – Out Stealing Horses (Ann Born, 2005)

47. Irène Némirovsky – Suite Française (Sandra Smith, 2006)

48. Vassily Grossman – Life and Fate (Robert Chandler, 2006)

49. Alaa Al Aswany – The Yacoubian Building (Humphrey Davies, 2007)

50. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace (Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky, 2007)

The list contains some of my favourite books (e.g. Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being for example, Gunther Grass' The Tin Drum), as well as a few I started but didn't finish (e.g the Calvino - why read on once you've got the joke? Eco's The Name of the Rose which I couldn't get into despite loving the film, and Xingjian Gao's Soul Mountain which was one of the worst reading experiences of my entire life!)

But the list shows up a lot more "potholes" in my reading and a gentle nudge in the right direction is always a good thing!

What titles would you like to see added or subtracted?

(Incidentally, did anyone else notice that Naguib Mafouz's Cairo Trilogy appears twice on the list in different translations?)

*(I took this list from the Times because their link was down.)

ZI Zips In Zestfully

As promised, guest blogged for us by Ezra Zaid of ZI Pulications :

ZI Publications is looking at producing good quality books for the Malaysian audience (surprise, surprise!). Local publishers have an intimate knowledge of its audiences interest towards topics on Malaysia – its politics/current affairs, history, humour, stories, personalities, etc. But, perhaps what hasn’t been happening as much is keeping up with the variety, quality and substance of books that the public deserves (and probably wants, too!).

Books that carry the ZI Publications logo have to be as good (in all aspects: concept, content, artwork, font size, choice of paper, etc) or better even, especially when they stack up right between Obama’s Audacity of Hope and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner - this is the reality of it.

We are looking to produce / currently producing works of Fiction and Non-Fiction, in both English and Bahasa Malaysia. That said, we feel that there is great potential in the Non-Fiction market for both languages, especially for the Malay language audience. Currently, the public doesn’t truly have the option of reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman or Coelho’s The Alchemist in Bahasa Malaysia; so the translation market is something that we’re going into aggressively - to provide current international bestsellers, books with international critical acclaim, and maybe some of the great classics in Bahasa Malaysia. Every other country is doing the same with their national languages, and it is about time we did too.

Expect to find the following titles from us in Bahasa Malaysia:

The Islamist by Ed Husain (Penguin UK)
No God but God by Reza Aslan (Random House)
Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea(Penguin USA)

...and many more to come.

We have other projects/ideas along the way, so stay tuned. Visit us at www.zipublications.com.my and get in touch with us – manuscripts, ideas, comments, opinions, etc., they’re all welcome.

You can also add ZI Publications as a Group on Facebook!

Unscary Translations

We're less afraid of tackling translated fiction these days, says Stuart Evers on The Guardian blog, and attributes this in no small part to the popularity of Japanese author, Haruki Murakami who proved that foreign fiction didn't have to be difficult and inaccessible, and so paved the way for others :

The Murakami effect has obviously benefited other Japanese writers such as Ryu Murakami (no relation), Hitomi Kanehara and Natsuo Kirino, but it's also helped people cast off negative preconceptions. Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Shadows of the Wind was a number-one bestseller, proving sales and translations are not mutually exclusive. This is especially true of crime writing, with more and more foreign novels appearing in translation. Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo, Anne Elliot, Boris Akunin and the irresistible Fred Vargas deliver unusual and compelling novels and are valued as highly as their English-writing contemporaries.

Out Stealing Awards

Although Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses is set in rural Norway and is a work of fiction in translation, it fits into a genre that readers of literary fiction will find familiar.

As in L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between (from which Petterson actually lifts a quote towards the end), as in John Banville's The Sea, we have an elderly man looking back on the events of a fateful summer when he was caught up in a web of events and powerful adult emotions that he is not yet equipped to deal with, and can only make sense of in retrospect. But whatever happened back then has left him emotionally stunted as an adult, and his only chance to heal his spirit is to finally make sense of it all.

The pivotal question, asked late in Out Stealing Horses, is whether its protagonist is the hero of his own life (the reference is lifted from Dickens' David Copperfield) or whether he abdicated that role to others. This certainly seems to be the case.

Petterson's novel shifts between three layers of time. Trond Sander, now 67 when the novel opens in 1999, has sold up all his possessions and moved to a secluded house in the far east of Norway where he intends to live out his days in solitude and simplicity. But an encounter with his neighbour, whom he recognises from his past bring memories flooding back of a fateful summer shortly after the war. Lars Haug, he realises, is the younger brother of his once best friend.

In 1948, 15 year old Trond is staying in a small cabin near the Swedish border with his father during the summer vacation. Ostensibly the trip is part holiday, part opportunity for a bit of father-son bonding.

Trond befriends Jon, the son of one of a neighbouring farmer, and the two are always off on outdoor adventures together. Very early one morning Jon invites his friend to come "Out stealing horses" (an expression which acquires other connotations in the book) but in this instance he just means riding the horses in a local farmer's field.

Later, while destroying a bird's nest, Jon suddenly seems to experience some sort of a breakdown, and it turns out that he left his hunting rifle at home forgetting to take the bullets out. Jon's two younger brothers fought over it, and Lars accidentally killed his twin brother. Trond never sees his friend again, as Jon disappears off to sea.

It strikes me that if a film were ever made of the novel (as I think must surely happen) it will be a whole different animal from the book. Films deal with sharply realised details, and close-ups. Petterson gives us only parts of the story, and then often in long distance shots, leaving space for us to create much of the story for ourselves. Trond gradually uncovers pieces of the story of his father's role in the Norwegian resistance during the war, and about the true nature of his relationship with Jon and Lars' mother. He also only later comes to realise why his father is so insistent that the trees around the cabin must be felled, and the logs floated downriver to a sawmill in Sweden, even though it is completely the wrong season to do this (the river too low to float timber effectively, the trunks heavy with sap.)

The novel is richly atmospheric with evocative descriptions of landscape careful descriptions of the practicalities of rural life.

Ann Born's translation captures the narrator's voice very well*, the slight hesitance at the beginning as he searches for a way to tell his story, the long run on sentences when he becomes excited, the terse exchanges of dialogue.

The novel has deservedly garnered plenty of accolades. It won the Independent Foreign Fiction Award 2006, last year's IMPAC Dublin Prize, and was a top ten New York Times Notable Book.

(*I must point out though that I found some grammatically questionable sentences in places and am surprised proofreaders did not pick these up.)

Verhaeghen Wins Foreign Fiction Award

This year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, given to a work in translation has been won by Belgian-born author Paul Verhaeghen for his 695-page novel Omega Minor, which has been described as both a “novel of ideas” and a “thriller. He translated the work from the original Dutch himself.

Verhaeghen is a cognitive psychologist whose work focuses on memory and basic aspects of cognitive aging. He has been living in the US since 1997 and is currently teaching at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He plans to donate his winnings to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in protest against the Bush administration's policies.

You can find more about the book at The Complete Review and there's an excellent interview with the author on Bookslut's blog.

I'm woefully behind with my reading of translated fiction - have only just started reading the 2006 winner of this prize!

Books from the Arab World

Arabic literature faces many challenges including censorship, bureaucracy, and the problems of reaching a wider market. But here are signs that it has never been more vibrant. In the Guardian today authors and critics give their views.

This comment from Palestinian poet and writer Mourid Barghouti should give us all pause for thought :

Arabic literature, both classical and modern, is almost absent from the world stage. The dominant culture of our times, western culture, has not seen other languages, discourses and civilisations as equally worthy approaches to the world. We'll reach nowhere if the concept of "universality" is not re-examined. No western writer questions his or her universality; it is the Arabs, the Africans and the Asians who should aspire to reach it, through translation. Translation being a chance, a favour, a medal, a stamp of recognition and a password to open the space for the lucky newcomers.

If you are interested in finding out more, do also check out Arab World Books.

Books from the Arab world is also the market focus of the London Book Fair this year, and the British Council is also providing a shop window for Arabic Writers.

Postscript (25/4/08) :

Boyd Tonkin in the Independent also looks at books from the Arabic world and the problems faced by authors and publishers.

Fiction in Translation

The Independent has announced the shortlist for its annual foreign fiction prize. Here are the nominated books with original language and the name of the translator (who stands to share the prize) :

Castorp - Paweł Huelle (Antonia Lloyd Jones, Polish)
Measuring The World - Daniel Kehlmann (Carol Brown Janeway)
Gregorius -Bengt Ohlsson (Silvester Mazzarella, Swedish)
The Model - Lars Saabye Christensen (Don Barlett, Norwegian)
The Way Of The Women - Marlene van Niekerk (Michiel do Heyns, Afrikaans)
Omega Minor - By Paul Verhaeghen, trans by the author (Dutch)

Although I haven't read any of the longlisted or shortlisted books, I am surprised at the non-inclusion of Alaa al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building. Ismail Kadare also does not make the cut.

You can read more about these books on the Independent website or click the links to find them on Amazon.co.uk

Meeting Max

My literary Saturday wouldn't have been complete without at least meeting Max Lane over at Silverfish, even if I missed his talk because we were still clearing up at Seksan's, just down the road.

But he was still signing copies of the freshly launched Arok of Java and I drew up a chair and had a really nice chat to him.

Max translated the works of the great Pramoedya Ananta Toer. I've read This Earth of Mankind and A Child of All Nations (the first two parts of The Buru Quartet) and can vouch the for the translations being a pleasure to read.

Deepika interviewed Max in Singapore a few days ago and fills in some of the big gaps I've left here. Go read.