David Grossman, whose To the End of the Land is one of the leading contenders for the BTB award. Photograph: John Macdougall/AFP David Grossman, Per Petterson and Amelie Nothomb are the major names leading the fiction longlist for this year's Best Translated Book awards, run from the University of Rochester in New York.Grossman's To The End of the Land, Petterson's I Curse the River of Time and Nothomb's Hygiene and The Assassin sit alongside many less familiar writers, including Moroccan novelist Abdelfattah Kilito (The Clash of Images) and German author Julia Franck (The Blindness of the Heart).But there is no showing on the 25-strong list, shown in full here, for novels published by Melville House, whose co-founder Dennis Johnson launched an outspoken critique of the award last autumn for accepting sponsorship from Amazon.com.Award co-founder Chad Post said the longlist, which takes in authors from 19 countries writing in 12 languages, is "a testament to the number of high-quality works in translation that are making their way to American readers, thanks to a number of talented translators and exciting publishing houses".However, with notable exceptions including Touch by Adania Shibli, translated from Arabic, and Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat, from Afrikaans the list is dominated by books first written in European languages. Novelist Orhan Pamuk complained at this week's Jaipur Literary Festival that writers in languages other than English were being marginalised, with festival director William Dalrymple observing that it was "particularly hard to get American publishing houses to take on translations", especially those written outside the major European languages.Almost all the books on the BTB list have come from small independent houses, such as Archipelago Books, Small Beer, New Directions, Bitter Lemon Press, and Graywolf.Prize organiser Chad Post said he accepted that ! the majo rity of translations published in the US are from the major western languages. "Of the 317 works of fiction and poetry published in translation in 2010, 142, or almost 45% of them, were translated from French, German, and Spanish," he said. "There's no single reason why this is the case, but one obvious factor is that there are a lot more editors in the US who can read French/German/Spanish than say, Icelandic. Also, it helps that the French and German book offices are particularly good at what they do and have well-established relationships with American publishers and editors." He added that while the judging committee focused on choosing the best books available, rather than getting a global spread, they had done "a pretty good job of spreading the love".Melville House, which won last year's BTB award for fiction with The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven, withdrew from any future involvement with the award in protest at the acceptance of sponsorship money from Amazon.com. The sponsorship enabled the prize to offer the winner a cash award for the first time.But Johnson called the online retailer "predatory" and "thuggish", and said that as many Melville House staff had previously worked in independent bookshops which find it difficult to compete with Amazon's steep discounts taking money from Amazon was "akin to the medical researchers who take money from cigarette companies." Later Melville House clarified that it would not block the eligibility of its authors and translators if they were nominated for the award by others. However, none of its books have made it on to this year's fiction longlist selection.Post said the judges had not excluded Melville House titles, but that the publisher had only three eligible books in the running this year. "Based on that, it doesn't seem all that remarkable that they were left off," he said.A 10-strong shortlist will be announced in late March.
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