Adventures in reading
The Desmond Elliott Prize jury has announced its shortlist:
This is quite a unified selection, with strong themes of family and secrets (and family secrets), and some very powerful moments. It’s difficult to guess which the judges might choose as a winner. We’ll find out on 1 July.
After the translations, the debuts: like last year, I am taking part in shadowing the Desmond Elliott Prize. Here is this year’s longlist:
First impressions? Elizabeth Is Missing was, of course, my favourite book read in 2014 (immediately ahead of last year’s Desmond Elliott winner, as it happens), so that’s my front-runner going into the shadowing. I’m also particularly pleased to see The Wake getting a nod. The biggest omission for me is Lucy Wood’s Weathering, a superb novel which I thought would be a dead cert for this longlist. Whatever else happens with this year’s Prize, I will be disappointed that Weathering is not in the mix.
Still, on we go. The links in the list above will take you to my reviews of the longlisted titles; I’ll be adding as many as I can in the weeks ahead. Finally, let me introduce you to the other members of this year’s shadow panel: El Ashfield, Dan Lipscombe, Zoe Venditozzi and Sarah Watkins.
After the shadow selection, we now have the official IFFP shortlist:
I think this is an interesting list, I can’t quite choose between this selection and ours, because my favourite titles cross both lists. But my favourite title on the longlist – The End of Days – is common to both. I’ll be very pleased if it takes the prize; I think it stands a good chance, too.
I’d also, though, have my eye on By Night the Mountain Burns as a wildcard contender. In any event, it’s wonderful to see the publisher And Other Stories make the IFFP shortlist (long overdue, if you ask me). But congratulations to all, and I look forward to the announcement of the winner on 27 May. Of course, we’ll be revealing our shadow winner shortly before then.
Read my other posts on the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize here.
The scores are in, the numbers have been crunched, and we can now reveal our shadow shortlist for this year’s IFFP:
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.
It’s time for this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and once again I will be joining the shadow jury in reading the longlist and selecting our own ‘winner’. But that’s getting ahead of myself; for now, here;s the longlist:
Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, By Night the Mountain Burns (Spanish: trans. Jethro Soutar), And Other Stories
Tomas Bannerhed, The Ravens (Swedish: trans. Sarah Death), Clerkenwell Press
Jenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days (German: trans. Susan Bernofsky), Portobello Books
Marcello Fois, Bloodlines (Italian: trans. Silvester Mazzarella), MacLehose Press
Tomás González, In the Beginning Was the Sea (Spanish: trans. Frank Wynne), Pushkin Press
Hamid Ismailov, The Dead Lake (Russian: trans. Andrew Bromfield), Peirene Press
Daniel Kehlmann, F (German: trans. Carol Brown Janeway), Quercus
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Boyhood Island (Norwegian: trans. Don Bartlett), Harvill Secker
J.M. Lee, The Investigation (Korean: trans. Chi-Young Kim), Mantle
Erwin Mortier, While the Gods Were Sleeping (Dutch: trans. Paul Vincent), Pushkin Press
Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Japanese: trans. Philip Gabriel), Harvill Secker
Judith Schalansky, The Giraffe’s Neck (German: trans. Shaun Whiteside), Bloomsbury
Stefanie de Velasco, Tiger Milk (German: trans. Tim Mohr), Head of Zeus
Timur Vermes, Look Who’s Back (German: trans. Jamie Bulloch), MacLehose Press
Can Xue, The Last Lover (Chinese: trans. Annelise Finegan), Yale University Press
I’ve read five of those already, and reviewed four. The official shortlist will be announced on 9 April, and we’ll reveal our shadow shortlist just before then. I am aiming to have read everything by then, and will try to review as much of the shortlist as I can. I’ll be using this post as an index, so you can click on the links above to see what I thought of each book.
General impressions of the longlist? I must admit, I would like to have seen Mathias Enard’s Zone and Elvira Dones’ Sworn Virgin make the cut. But there are writers on here whom I’ve been meaning to read, like Erpenbeck and Xue; it’ll be interesting to try Knausgaard and Murakami once again; and there are certainly some very intriguing books on that list. (As an aside, I also have to say that this list shows how vital small publishers are to fiction in translation.)
Finally, let me introduce you to the other bloggers in this year’s shadow jury:
Stu of Winstonsdad
Tony of Tony’s Reading List
Bellezza of Dolce Bellezza
Tony of Messengers Booker (and more)
Joe of Roughghosts
Chelsea of The Globally Curious
Clare of A Little Blog of Books
Emma of Words and Peace
Grant of 1streading
Julianne of Never Stop Reading
I hope you’ll join us in exploring and celebrating fiction from around the world in the coming months.
A few bits of news and comment on awards that I like to follow:
On Tuesday, this year’s BBC National Short Story Award went to Lionel Shriver for her story ‘Kilifi Creek‘. The runner up was Zadie Smith for ‘Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets‘; the other shortlisted authors were Tessa Hadley, Francesca Rhydderch, and Rose Tremain. I hadn’t caught any of the stories prior to the announcement; but I’ve since read the Comma Press anthology, and I have to say that Smith’s story is easily my favourite of the five. Shriver’s winning piece is not really to my taste: it’s written in a (to me) fussy literary prose for which I’m increasingly losing patience. I think my tastes in reading are shifting once more.
So to the Goldsmiths Prize, for “fiction that opens up new possibilities for the novel form” – something that interests me increasingly, as my interest in straightforward realism wanes. The Prize got off to an excellent start last year, going to Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. I was really looking forward to seeing what would be selected this year, and now we have a shortlist:
First impressions… Half of the titles overlap with the Booker longlist, which surprises me – I was expecting (and, to be honest, hoping for) more divergence. The Kingsnorth (which is the only book of these that I’ve read) absolutely deserves to be here, and would be a worthy winner. From what I’ve heard about them, I can see the inclusion of the Smith, but am less persuaded about the Jacobson. Of the remaining three, I’m most interested in the Eaves, which I understand is written as a collage of fragments in different voices; the Cusk and Rahman, I’m undecided about. Overall, I have a nagging sense that this list is treading water a bit; it doesn’t feel as bold as I would hope. Still, there’s potential for another good result here.
Finally, a call for volunteers: following on from shadowing the IFFP and Desmond Elliott Prize earlier in the year, I’ve been asked if I’d like to shadow the JQ-Wingate Prrze (“the only UK award to recognise writing by Jewish and non-Jewish writers that explore themes of Jewish concern in any of its myriad possible forms either explicitly or implicitly”). Would anyone like to take part? The timeframe would be from November (shortlist) to February (winner); six books, a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, Anglophone or translated. Let me know if you’re interested!
It doesn’t seem a year since I was pleasantly surprised to see the second novel by one of my favourite new authors make the Man Booker Prize longlist. I didn’t dare think at the time that she would go on to win, but she did – so, as far as I’m concerned, this year’s Booker jury have a very tough act to follow.
Now we have a first glimpse of where the 2014 Man Booker Prize may go, with the publication of the longlist:
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Joshua Ferris (Viking)
The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus)
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent’s Tail)
The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre)
J, Howard Jacobson (Jonathan Cape)
The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth (Unbound)
The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell (Sceptre)
The Lives of Others, Neel Mukherjee (Chatto & Windus)
Us, David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton)
The Dog, Joseph O’Neill (Fourth Estate)
Orfeo, Richard Powers (Atlantic Books)
How to be Both, Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
History of the Rain, Niall Williams (Bloomsbury)
Now, it’s true that I’m not as invested in a single novel this year as I was with The Luminaries (I hadn’t read The Luminaries at this point last year, but I was anticipating it like nothing else), so I’m approaching this list in a more detached frame of mind. Still, though, I wish I could be more excited by this selection. The books that intrigue me most are the Kingsnorth (which is set shortly after the Battle of Hastings and written in a version of Old English) and the Smith (a ‘literary fresco’ – narrative layered on narrative?). The Mitchell could be interesting; the Powers and Fowler, maybe; the rest, I’m not really fussed about exploring.
Overall, at first blush, this feels like a longlist that’s playing it safe – a lot of major names, not a lot that sounds particularly unusual. I also find it disappointing that, after the Prize has been opened up to Anglophone writers of any nationality, we’ve ended up with a longlist that’s not very structurally diverse at all.
So I won’t be following the Booker too closely this year. There’s potential for an interesting shortlist, and I hope we get one – but I don’t see it reaching the heights of last year’s Prize.
As announced on Thursday night, the winner of this year’s Desmond Elliott Prize is… A Girl is a Half-formed Thing.
I’m very pleased with that result – and not only because Eimear McBride’s book was my favourite on the longlist. The continued success of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing – like that of The Luminaries before it – gives me hope that there’s a real place out there for fiction that challenges the norm and follows its own path. And that, in turn, makes me want to find and read more of such fiction, and tell people about what I’ve enjoyed. If there’s one thing I can do with this blog, I’d want that to be it.
The result of the Desmond Elliott Prize will be announced imminently, so it’s time to reveal the shadow jury’s selection. Our shadow shortlist comprised Robert Allison’s The Letter Bearer, Nathan Filer’s The Shock of the Fall, and Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. And after discussing it and reaching a consensus, we came up with our shadow winner… The Shock of the Fall.
Interestingly (and like the shadow IFFP jury) our winner isn’t even on the official shortlist – but without doubt, it’s a book worth reading, and Filer’s a name to follow in the future.
So, to the actual Desmond Elliott Prize – will it go to Robert Allison, Eimear McBride, or D.W. Wilson? We’ll find out on Thursday night. For now, I’d like to thank my fellow shadow jurors Dan, Heather, Kaite, Jackie, and Sarah – it’s been great fun.
The official shortlist was announced yesterday:
Well. This shortlist has two books in common with our shadow selection, but the inclusion of Ballistics actually gives it a very different character overall. As with the IFFP shortlist, I find it fascinating to see the consensus of another group of readers.
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing remains my favourite book from the Desmond Elliott longlist (read my review here), and I think it has a good chance of winning. We’ll find out on 3 July.
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