Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist

       Less than ten days after the longlist for the (US) Best Translated Book Award was announced, now the (UK) Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012 longlist announced -- and while eligibility requirements (published in the respective countries; BTBA doesn't allow re-translations, IFFP doesn't allow dead authors) mean the pool wasn't quite the same for both prizes, it is still surprising to see that only two titles -- New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani and Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz -- made both longlists. (Does that make them favorites ?)
       The IFFP longlist includes books in three different Far East Asian languages -- Chinese, Korean, and Japanese --, all eligible for the BTBA, but all falling short of the BTBA longlist (which includes no translations from any of those languages ...). Neither list includes any translation from the Arabic.
       Sadly, the IFFP longlist also seems further proof that there is a huge gender-disparity in what is being translated, with far less fiction written by women being translated (even as a lot is being translated by women) than by men: a mere two of the fifteen titles are authored by women.
       Among the other titles from the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist under review at the complete review are:

• Professor Andersen's Night by Dag Solstad (which was not BTBA eligible)
• 1Q84 by Murakami Haruki
• Please Look After Mother by Shin Kyung-sook

       And there's also The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco .....
       See also judge Boyd Tonkin's overview in The Independent, The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize long-list spans a planet of stories.