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

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.

OK, at least one more day of fiction longlist clues. (Should have the poetry list by the weekend, so I can post some poetry-specific clues on Saturday and Sunday.)

The big clue yesterday was: “There is only one female writer from Mexico on the list.” Just to clarify a bit, according to the Translation Database, there are three women writers from Mexico who had a work of fiction come out in English last year: Guadalupe Nettel, Valeria Luiselli, and Carmen Boullosa. All three are stellar writers; all three books deserve to be on this list. So, when you’re submitting your guesses, this is the first choice you’ll have to make.

Here are a couple more clues to help you fill out your guess:

• The UK equivalent of the BTBA is the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, which recently announced its longlist. There is only one title that made both the IFFP and BTBA fiction longlists.

• There are two books on the PEN Translation Prize longlist that also made the BTBA.

• Five of the books on the BTBA fiction longlist have one-word titles.