Best Translated Book Award 2015: Clues to the Fiction Longlist [Part Three]

As I explained on Monday, to start building the hype for this year’s Best Translated Book Award longlists, I’m going to be dropping a series of clues over the course of this week, and, if you’re able to guess one complete list (25 titles for fiction, 10 for poetry) on your first try, you’ll receive a lifetime subscription to Open Letter Books.

To enter, just send your complete list by Sunday, April 5th at 8pm EDT to chad.post [at] rochester [dot] edu. I’ll let you know how close you came.

Here’s a recap of the clues so far: nine languages and sixteen places or origin are represented on the fiction longlist; nine of the twenty-five fiction titles are by women and fifteen of the twenty-seven translators who made it (one translator made it twice) are women; and twenty different presses are on the fiction longlist, with no press receiving more than two nominations.

I’m still stuck in a sort of bean-counter mode, since coming up with clues for specific books seems like it would only help you in very small ways, and I haven’t been able to find any major trends that would be interesting and useful . . . That said, here’s what I got:

• Six of the books on the fiction longlist contain more than one story/novella.

• Three of the books are longer than 400 pages. (All of these are novels.)

And, because you deserve something a bit more:

• There is only one female writer from Mexico on the list.