Best Translated Book Award, Pulitzer Prize and Baileys Women's Prize Updates

I’ve been busy reading away, doing reviews and although checking the literary news, not bringing you any updates. It’s about time I did so.

Best Translated Book Award

The original twenty five books have been whittled down to a shortlist of ten books – the winner being announced tomorrow (I personally will be making my way through half a dozen from the longlist and if the winner’s not in the selection I do own, then I’m likely to purchase it for a future review. Anyways the shortlist is:

Horses Of God by Mahi Binebine (translated by Lulu Norman)

Blinding by Micrea Cartarescu (translated by Sean Cotter)

The Story Of A New Name by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

Tirza by Arnon Grunberg (translated by Sam Garrett)

My Struggle: Book Two by Karl Ove Knausgaard (translated by Don Bartlett)

Seiobo There Below by Laszlo Krasznahorkai (translated by Ottilie Mulzet)

A True Novel by Minae Mizumura (translated by Juliet Winters)

The African Shore by Rodrigo Rey Rosa (translated by Jeffrey Gray)

Leg Over Leg Vol. 1 by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (translated by Humphrey Davies)

The Forbidden Kingdom by Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (translated by Paul Vincent)

The Pulitzer Prize (Fiction)

Winner was “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt – according to the panel “a beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters that follows a grieving boy’s entanglement with a small famous painting that has eluded destruction, a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart.”

Finalists were “The Son” by Philipp Meyer and “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul” by Bob Shacochis.

The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction

The shortlist for this award was announced nearly three weeks ago (sorry I was on holidays at the time!!!)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Americanah

Hannah Kent – Burial Rites

Jhumpa Lahiri – The Lowland

Audrey Magee – The Undertaking

Eimear McBride – A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

Donna Tartt – The Goldfinch (the Pulitzer Winner)

I have copies of Burial Rites and The Lowland, may get to them someday soon (don’t hold your breath though the backlog is stacking up).

You may also have noticed that I’ve been doing a little housekeeping on the blog. I’ve started adding new tags to each review with the awards that I follow added in a “tag” – this will make it easier to find a link on the right hand side of the blog and quickly locate reviews from a certain award and year. I’ve also changed the headings to not be specific to being on Longlist or Shortlist as these do change after I’ve written the review, so I’ve simply put the Award (eg. “Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014”). It will take me a week or two to get through the hundreds of reviews published here so bear with me. It could be a little while before I’m back as I’m tackling Antonio Munoz Molina’s “In The Night Of Time” from the Best Translated Book Award Longlist and at 640 pages it’s going to take me a little while.