PEN Literary Awards longlists

       They've announced the longlists for the (many) PEN Literary Awards (with the finalists to be announced 15 April, and the winners on 13 May).

       Among the prizes is the US$3,000 PEN Translation Prize, awarded: "For a book-length translation of prose into English published in 2014".
       The longlisted titles are:

• Baboon by Naja Marie Aidt (tr. Denise Newman)
• The Gray Notebook by Josep Pla (tr. Peter Bush)
• I Ching (tr. John Minford)
• The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura (tr. Anna Kushner)
• The Master of Confessions by Thierry Cruvellier (tr. Alex Gilly)
• Self-Portrait in Green by Marie NDiaye (tr. Jordan Stump)
• The Symmetry Teacher by Andrei Bitov (tr. Polly Gannon)
• Texas: The Great Theft by Carmen Boullosa ((tr. Samantha Schnee)
• Trans-Atlantyk by Witold Gombrowicz (tr. Danuta Borchardt)
• The Woman Who Borrowed Memories by Tove Jansson (tr. Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella)

       It'll be interesting to see what overlap there is with the Best Translated Book Award (which will announce its 25-title longlist on 7 April). Several of these titles are not eligible for the BTBA -- non-fiction (The Master of Confessions) or re-translations such as the 'alternate translation' of the Gombrowicz -- but most are.
       By comparison: none of the PEN titles are among the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlisted ones. Again, there are eligibility-criteria differences (none of the dead authors are IFFP eligible, for example), but it's still surprising .....
       (Note also that, unlike the BTBA and the IFFP, the PEN prize is pay-to-play: there's a submission fee (US$50) and it's no stretch to believe that some notable omissions on the longlist can be attributed to the books not having been entered.)

       (As to all those other PEN awards: to my embarrassment, I haven't read a one of the many, many titles longlisted in any of the other categories.)