The scores are in, the numbers have been crunched, and we can now reveal our shadow shortlist for this year’s IFFP:
- The Ravens by Tomas Bannerhed (tr.Sarah Death)
- Zone by Mathias Enard (tr. Charlotte Mandell)
- The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck (tr. Susan Bernofsky)
- Bloodlines by Marcello Fois (tr.Silvester Mazzarella)
- The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov (tr. Andrew Bromfield)
- Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami (tr. Philip Gabriel)
We decided to ‘call in’ Zone as a sixteenth title, because a number of us felt strongly that it should have been longlisted for real – and now here it is on our shortlist. Last year’s shadow winner (The Sorrow of Angels) didn’t appear on the actual shortlist; this year, we could have a shadow winner that’s not even on the longlist, which would be an interesting situation…
But we’ll find all that out in due course. First up is the official shortlist, which will be announced tomorrow. I think we in the shadow jury have come up with a strong selection here; I wonder how the ‘real’ jury’s will compare.
Read my other posts on the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize here.
9th April 2015 at 7:33 am
And by the time I read this the shortlist announcement was out. Was there one title that stood head and shoulders above the rest for you?
10th April 2015 at 7:33 pm
Yes, The End of Days is easily my favourite – I’m rooting for it to win, and think it stands a good chance.