The winner of the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for both the Shadow panel and the official panel is....
Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days, translated by Susan Bernofsky from the German! You can read my review here.
I would also like to give special mention to Zone by Mathias Enard, translated by Charlotte Mandell. Zone barely lost to The End of Days in the final shadow panel voting. You can read my review here.
Reading together with the other members of the shadow panel was a great experience; for once, all of us book bloggers had actually read the same books! This allowed me to really get a feel for what the other bloggers are interested in, and made for some very good discussions.
But I was less than satisfied with the books that made the IFFP longlist. They were not diverse enough for my taste (at least 9 out of the 16 we read were from Europe...), and took me too far away from the regions that I am most interested in.
I thought that maybe shadowing the American Best Translated Book Award might be more to my taste. But then I saw that my least favorite book from the IFFP longlist, Can Xue's The Last Lover, which I found completely unintelligible, won the BTBA this year. So maybe I wouldn't like that award better.
I am happy that I did the shadow panel this year, as it gave me the opportunity to make friends and read some books that I loved (Zone, Bloodlines, The Ravens) that I wouldn't have picked up otherwise. But I don't see myself doing it again next year.
Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days, translated by Susan Bernofsky from the German! You can read my review here.
I would also like to give special mention to Zone by Mathias Enard, translated by Charlotte Mandell. Zone barely lost to The End of Days in the final shadow panel voting. You can read my review here.
Reading together with the other members of the shadow panel was a great experience; for once, all of us book bloggers had actually read the same books! This allowed me to really get a feel for what the other bloggers are interested in, and made for some very good discussions.
But I was less than satisfied with the books that made the IFFP longlist. They were not diverse enough for my taste (at least 9 out of the 16 we read were from Europe...), and took me too far away from the regions that I am most interested in.
I thought that maybe shadowing the American Best Translated Book Award might be more to my taste. But then I saw that my least favorite book from the IFFP longlist, Can Xue's The Last Lover, which I found completely unintelligible, won the BTBA this year. So maybe I wouldn't like that award better.
I am happy that I did the shadow panel this year, as it gave me the opportunity to make friends and read some books that I loved (Zone, Bloodlines, The Ravens) that I wouldn't have picked up otherwise. But I don't see myself doing it again next year.
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