It was with great excitement and joy that the Shadow Jury for the IFFP, organized by Stu and Tony, read the list of fifteen books which were long listed on March 8. When we emailed one another our results, we all agreed that the top six should be as follows:
- The Infatuations by Javier Marias
- Brief Loves That Live Forever by Andrei Makine
- The Sorrow of Angels by Jon Kalman Stefansson
- The Mussel Feast by Brigit Vanderbeke
- A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard
- The Corpse Washer by Sinan Antoon
Content with our decision, I went to bed on April 5 certain that the official short list would include several of the top books from our list. Surely, I thought, it will contain my personal favorite: The Sorrow of Angels.
Nope.
The Independent Foreign Fiction prize short list included instead the following six:
- The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim
- A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard
- A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli
- The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke
- Revenge by Yoko Ogawa
- Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami
- Alev Adil, Artist in Residence, Principal Lecturer and Programme Leader for MA Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich
- British writer, broadcaster and former stand-up comedian Natalie Haynes
- Nadifa Mohamed, award-winning author
- Boyd Tonkin, Senior Writer and Columnist, The Independent
- Literary translator Shaun Whiteside