Two German Titles Shortlisted for Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

As The Bookseller reports, that shortlist is out, and on it are two books translated out of German: Julia Franck's The Blind Side of the Heart (trans. Anthea Bell) and Rafik Schami's The Dark Side of Love, translated – well, also by Anthea Bell.

There are actually other German-English translators out there, honest. It's just they don't seem to get nominated for any awards in Britain, or at least not in this past year. In which the venerable Anthea won the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation for Stefan Zweig's Burning Secret and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for Sasa Stanisic's How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. Oh, and that small matter of the OBE.