In the early days of my blog, I was finding writers to read. I found the landscape for translated fiction has changed in the time I have been blogging. It is a lot more spoken about and mentioned than it was a decade ago. So, when in the early days I wanted to find books to read, it was to the prize lists that I looked. The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize was the biggest one for me in the UK. That had been in operation since 1990. Around this time, I also discovered a blog called Kevin from Canada, a former newspaper journalist and now sadly no longer with us. He had set up the Shadow Giller prize following the longlist and a panel of bloggers reading the Giller longlist and picking their own winner. I stole that idea and put it into shadowing the IFFP jury. We started in 2012, and I chaired the panel of judges for the next four years.

In 2016, the Booker Prize took over the IFFP and replaced the Booker International prize, which had been for a writer’s body of work with the IFFP format of longlist, shortlist, and winner. I then chaired the prize shadow jury in 2017, and after that, I let Tony from Tony’s reading list chair the prize as he is far more organized than I am. Apart from one year I have been on the shadow jury for the last 12 years so have read 150ish books from the longlist from all around the world. This list of books forms the core of my blog. Seeing the longlist and shadowing the prize is always a joy. On one occasion, we added a book to the longlist we felt had been missed: Mathias Enard’s book, Zone, and it won a shadow jury prize. So, if you are looking for books in translation, these two prizes are good.

I do miss the Man Asian Prize, for which I joined one of my favorite bloggers, Lisa from ANZLITLOVER, in doing a shadow jury focused on Asian literature. The year we did it, we found some great books in translation from India. Sadly, many of these books never make it outside India to be read. There are also so many prizes around the world and you often find winning a prize in the books’ native language will lead to it winning translated prizes like Prix Goncourt in France, or for example, the Nordic book prize covering the Nordic countries. Also, the German book prize. There are so many. If you want great books from a country, find the book prizes and see which books got translated.

Then, I go to the Nobel Prize, which serves my reading in two ways. I love following the betting for the prize as it throws up writers from around the world, and some I wasn’t so aware of, so I always pick a book up from them to try. A perfect example would be Patrick Modiano. He had a few books in English translation, but most were out-of-print when he won the Booker. I know, as I had read one when his name had climbed up the betting the year he won. I found The Search Warrant and reviewed it five days before he won the Nobel Prize. He has since gone on to have more of his books translated into English. I have said many times what would happen if a writer that hadn’t been translated into English won? The nearest this has happened is when the avant garde German writer Ulrich Holbein climbed in the betting one year.  But the list of winners is a great place to discover writers you may have missed. So this month, I will revisit some of the books from the Shadow years and some Noble Prize winners I have reviewed over the years.