William Andrew Murray Boyd is a Scottish novelist, short story writer and screenwriter.
Timothy Peter Mo is a British Asian novelist. Born to a British mother and a Hong Kong father, Mo lived in Hong Kong until the age of 10, when he moved to Britain. Educated at Mill Hill School and St John's College, Oxford, Mo worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist.
Vladimir Georgiyevich Sorokin is a contemporary postmodern Russian writer of novels, short stories, and plays. He has been described as one of the most popular writers in modern Russian literature. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he has been living in exile in Berlin.
Ice is the solid form of water.
Rupert Thomson, FRSL is an English writer. He is the author of thirteen critically acclaimed novels and an award-winning memoir. He has lived in many cities around the world, including Athens, Berlin, New York, Sydney, Los Angeles, Amsterdam and Rome. In 2010, after several years in Barcelona, he moved back to London. He has contributed to the Financial Times, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Granta and the Independent.
The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (1990–2015) was a British literary award. It was inaugurated by British newspaper The Independent to honour contemporary fiction in translation in the United Kingdom. The award was first launched in 1990 and ran for five years before falling into abeyance. It was revived in 2001 with the financial support of Arts Council England. Beginning in 2011 the administration of the prize was taken over by BookTrust, but retaining the "Independent" in the name. In 2015, the award was disbanded in a "reconfiguration" in which it was merged with the Man Booker International Prize.
Mohammed Moulessehoul, better known by the pen name Yasmina Khadra, is an Algerian author living in France, who writes in French. One of the most famous Algerian novelists in the world, he has written almost 40 novels, and has published in more than 50 countries. Khadra has often explored Algerian and other Arab countries' civil wars, depicting Muslim conflicts and reality, the attraction of radical Islamism to those alienated by the incompetence and hypocrisy of politicians, and conflicts between East and West. In his several writings on the Algerian war, he has exposed the regime and the fundamentalist opposition as the joint guilty parties in the country's tragedy.
Serpent's Tail is London-based independent publishing firm founded in 1986 by Pete Ayrton. It specialises in publishing work in translation, particularly European crime fiction. In January 2007, it was bought by a British publisher Profile Books.
Philippe Claudel is a French writer and film director.
Samuel Shimon is an Iraqi writer and journalist of Assyrian descent. He left Iraq in 1979 with dreams of becoming a director in Hollywood, and has since then lived in Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Nicosia, Aden, Cairo, Tunis and Paris, before finally settling in London. Along with his wife Margaret Obank, he is a co-founder and, since issue #39, editor of the literary magazine Banipal.
The Sense of an Ending is a 2011 novel written by British author Julian Barnes. The book is Barnes's eleventh novel written under his own name and was released on 4 August 2011 in the United Kingdom. The Sense of an Ending is narrated by a retired man named Tony Webster, who recalls how he and his clique met Adrian Finn at school and vowed to remain friends for life. When the past catches up with Tony, he reflects on the paths he and his friends have taken. In October 2011, The Sense of an Ending was awarded the Booker Prize. The following month it was nominated in the novels category at the Costa Book Awards.
Bro is a science fiction novel by Vladimir Sorokin, the first part in the series The Ice Trilogy, a “tripartite extravaganza [that] pummels the reader with super-dense chunks of satire, fantasy, parody, history and paranoid pseudo-theory.“ The other volumes are, respectively, Ice and 23,000. Although it chronologically precedes Ice, it was written several years after Ice was published.
Call the Midwife, later called Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950s, is a memoir by Jennifer Worth, and the first in a trilogy of books describing her work as a district nurse and midwife in the East End of London during the 1950s. Worth wrote the book after retiring from a subsequent career as a musician, and it was originally published in July 2002. Reissued in 2007, it became a bestseller, as did the sequel Shadows of the Workhouse and the final volume Farewell to the East End (2009). By the time of Jennifer Worth’s death in June 2011, her books had already sold almost a million copies. In 2012, the popular BBC/PBS adaptation of the trilogy boosted sales further, and all four of the author's books about the East End went back into the charts.
Ice is a 2002 novel by the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin. The story is set in a brutal Russia of the near future, where the Tunguska meteor has provided a mysterious cult with a material which can make people's hearts speak. The book is the first written part of Sorokin's Ice Trilogy, although the second part in the narrative; it was followed by Bro in 2004 and 23,000 in 2006.
Alice is a 2009 short story collection by the German writer Judith Hermann. It was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
From the Mouth of the Whale is a 2008 novel by the Icelandic writer Sjón. The English translation was shortlisted for the 2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. and the 2013 International Dublin Literary Award.
New Finnish Grammar is a 2000 novel by the Italian writer Diego Marani. It was translated from the Italian by Judith Landry and published by Dedalus Books in 2011. In Italy, the book won the Grinzane Cavour Prize in 2001. The English edition was shortlisted for the 2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2012 Best Translated Book Award.
Peirene Press is an independent publishing house based in London. Established by novelist and publisher Meike Ziervogel, Peirene is primarily focused on bringing out high-quality English translations of contemporary European short novels. Peirene is also known for its regular literary salons, and for its pop-up bookstalls outside supermarkets and at farmers markets. Peirene Press donates 50p from the sale of each book to Counterpoint Arts, a charity that promotes the creative arts by and about refugees and migrants in the UK.
Anna Sorokin, also known as Anna Delvey, is a con artist and fraudster who posed as a wealthy heiress to access upper-class New York social and art scenes from 2013 to 2017.
Boyd Tonkin Hon. FRSL is an English writer, journalist and literary critic. He was the literary editor of The Independent newspaper from 1996 to 2013. A long-time proponent of foreign-language literature, he is the author of The 100 Best Novels in Translation (2018). He has been involved with leading literary prizes such as the Man Booker International Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. In 2020 Tonkin was the recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature.
