Thursday 24 March 2011

BTBA Shortlists

The ten-title fiction shortlist for America's Best Translated Book Award is out now. And lo and behold, the book that I championed with bare-faced favouritism has made it among the finalists - Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation, translated by Susan Bernofsky. Plus another German title by a dead writer which I haven't read, Ernst Weiss's Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer, translated by Joel Rotenberg.

It's a little sad that Julia Franck's book The Blindness of the Heart (trans. Anthea Bell) didn't make it through, but on the other hand it's a more commercial title and obviously up against some stiff competition. And no German-language writers on the poetry shortlist either.

The winners are announced at the PEN World Voices Festival - which looks like it'll be a ball although the full schedule's not out until tomorrow - on 29 April.

No comments: