Awards Update - Two Long Lists, One Shortlist and Two Winners (well one winner of two awards)

Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2014

Formerly known as the Orange Prize (and simply the Women’s Prize last year) the longlist for the 2014 Prize was announced on 6 March 2014. The shortlist will be forthcoming on 7 April with the winner getting a £30,0000 prize on 4 June 2014.

The longlist is as follows:

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah
• Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam
• Suzanne Berne –  The Dogs of Littlefield
• Fatima Bhutto - The Shadow of the Crescent Moon
• Claire Cameron –  The Bear
• Lea Carpenter - Eleven Days
• M.J. Carter - The Strangler Vine
• Eleanor Catton - The Luminaries
• Deborah Kay Davies - Reasons She Goes to the Woods
• Elizabeth Gilbert - The Signature of All Things
• Hannah Kent - Burial Rites
• Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers
• Jhumpa Lahiri - The Lowland
• Audrey Magee - The Undertaking
• Eimear McBride - A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing
• Charlotte Mendelson - Almost English
• Anna Quindlen - Still Life with Bread Crumbs
• Elizabeth Strout - The Burgess Boys
• Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch
• Evie Wyld - All The Birds, Singing

For more details on the Prize go to http://www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/

The Folio Prize

The inaugural Folio Prize was announced on 10 March and the winner was George Saunders “the best short story writer in English – not ‘one of’, not ‘arguably’ but the Best” (Time). His collection “Tenth of December” was deemed “a dazzling and disturbing collection of short stories that illuminate human experience and explore figures lost in a labyrinth of troubling preoccupations.” The prize was worth £40,000. For more details go to http://www.thefolioprize.com/

The Story Prize

The same collection (“Tenth of December” by George Saunders) was announced as the US$20,000 winner of the “Story Prize” on 6 March 2014. The three finalists were (obviously George Saunders), Andrea Barrett for “Archangel” and Rebecca Lee for “Bobcat”. More details on the prize can be found at http://www.thestoryprize.org/

Well done George Saunders on picking up two Awards and about US$86,500 within 4 days.

The Best Translated Book Award for Fiction 2014

The longlist for the 2014 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction was announced on 11 March (in the USA). The winning writer and translator receive US$20,000. The twenty five titles are as follows:

• Horses of God by Mahi Binebine, translated from the French by Lulu Norman (Morocco)
• Blinding by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter (Romania)
• Textile by Orly Castel-Bloom, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu (Israel)
• Sleet by Stig Dagerman, translated from the Swedish by Steven Hartman (Sweden)
• The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Italy)
• Tirza by Arnon Grunberg, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett (Netherlands)
• Her Not All Her by Elfriede Jelinek, translated from the German by Damion Searls (Austria)
• My Struggle: Book Two by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Norway)
• Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (Hungary)
• Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull (Ukraine)
• The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor (Argentina)
• The Infatuations by Javier Marías, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (Spain)
• A True Novel by Minae Mizumura, translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters (Japan)
• In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Spain)
• The African Shore by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Gray (Guatemala)
• Through the Night by Stig Sæterbakken, translated from the Norwegian by Seán Kinsella (Norway)
• Commentary by Marcelle Sauvageot, translated from the French by Christine Schwartz Hartley & Anna Moschovakis (France)
• Leg Over Leg Vol. 1 by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies (Lebanon)
• The Whispering Muse by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb (Iceland)
• The Forbidden Kingdom by Jan Jacob Slauerhoff, translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent (Netherlands)
• The Devil’s Workshop by Jáchym Topol, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker (Czech Republic)
• The End of Love by Marcos Giralt Torrente, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (Spain)
• Red Grass by Boris Vian, translated from the French by Paul Knobloch (France)
• City of Angels, or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud by Christa Wolf, translated from the German by Damion Searls (Germany)
• Sandalwood Death by Mo Yan, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt (China)

For more details go to http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?s=btb

PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award Finalists 2014

According to the Pen/Faulkner website “the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction is given to the best work of fiction published in a given year.” The blurb neglects to mention that it is for an American citizen, and one must assume written in English!! But we’ll go with their press release. The winner will be announced on 2 April 2014 and will receive US$15,000, the four other finalists will receive US$5,000.

The finalists are:

• Daniel Alarcon’s “At Night We Walk In Circles”
• Percival Everett’s “Percival Everett by Virgil Russell”
• Karen Joy Fowler’s “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves”
• Joan Silber’s “Fools”
• Valerie Trueblood’s “Search Party: Stories of Rescue”

 More details of this award can be found at http://www.penfaulkner.org/award-for-fiction/

My reviews do not cover a lot of those works – (only a scathing one of “Almost English” from the Baily’s list), I have read “The Luminaries” but not reviewed it and “The Lowland” and “Burial Rites” from the same list are on my shelf, unread as yet. From the Best Translated Book Award list the Karl Ove Knausgaard and Javier Marias works also appear on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize list and I have recently reviewed both of these. I have also reviewed “The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal” from the BTBA list.

A few to get through? In the words of Bjork, “Possibly? Maybe?”