Our verdict on this year’s Man Booker International Prize longlist

The longlist for the Man Booker International Prize for fiction – judged by a very impressive panel headed by Lisa Appignanesi and including Michael Hofmann, Hari Kunzru, Helen Oyeyemi and our own Tim Martin – is out. Special props to super-translator Frank Wynne, who has translated not one but two of the thirteen books on the longlist; one from French and one from Spanish, smarty-pants that he is.

It also bears noting how many of these books have only appeared in English thanks to the perspicacity of small presses, and lists with a special interest in translated fiction. Not one of these books is on the main imprint of a major fiction house – bearing out Milan Kundera’s wise remarks about what he calls the ‘parochialism of large nations’.

Instead their publishers are Fitzcarraldo, Oneworld, MacLehose Press, Tuskar Rock, Portobello, Seagull, Text, Charco and Harvill Secker (a particularly cultivated part of the Random Penguin family).