Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist

       Next week the 25-title-strong longlist for the (US) Best Translated Book Award (I'm one of the judges) will be announced, and it's always fun to compare that with the (UK) Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, which has now announced its longlist -- not at the official site, yet, last I checked, but Boyd Tonkin spills the beans in his The Week in Books column in The Independent, in From Syria to Colombia, and Albanian to Afrikaans, enjoy a global feast.
       Several of the titles are under review at the complete review; the complete list (with review-links, where applicable):

• Black Bazaar by Alain Mabanckou
• Bundu by Chris Barnard
• Cold Sea Stories by Paweł Huelle
• A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard
• The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker
• Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas
• The Fall of the Stone City by Ismail Kadare
• HHhH by Laurent Binet
• In Praise of Hatred by Khaled Khalifa
• The Last of the Vostyachs by Diego Marani
• The Murder of Halland by Pia Juul
• Satantango by Krasznahorkai László
• Silent House by Orhan Pamuk
• The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
• Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman
• Trieste by Daša Drndić

       Observations: it's a very male-dominated list -- and doesn't manage to look farther east than Turkey/Syria (there's nothing from the Chinese, Japanese, or Korean). Nothing from the Russian either, and among the languages from which the most is translated into English it's noteworthy that there are only two titles from the French, and none from German. [No doubt there are similar odd lacunae in the BTBA list; I'm just saying .....]
       There is a bit of overlap with the BTBA longlist (sorry, you'll have to wait until next week to find out how much), but a lot of these titles weren't considered for the BTBA because they haven't been published in the US yet (the Bakker, Barnard, Huelle, Kadare, and Vásquez will all only be considered for next year's BTBA, for example, and several others don't seem to have any US publisher/distributor yet).
       Overall it's a solid list, with a couple of titles I love.