From the Mouth...

This is late in the day but the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (IFFP) was awarded to Blooms of Darkness, which I reviewed recently.

Personally I would have liked to seen the Sjon win or New Finnish Grammar with Blooms of Darkness a bit of a Marmite book for me. I guess you either liked it or didn't but the judges must have done.

Having been a member of the Shadow IFFP prize, which was a real honour, it was interesting to have a debate and see which way we came down on our own choice of winner.

The choice of the panel, which included excellent must-follow bloggers, was From the mouth of the whale by Sjon.



The chair of the Shadow IPPF Stu over at Winston's Dad, summed up the reasons for that book being chosen

"We all liked and some of us loved this book no one really had a bad word about it ,I think from when ever any one of us judges read it we feel for it as a book and Sjon’s voice .We felt Sjon had captured through Jonas eyes the 17th century Iceland so well ,this was helped by Victoria's translation that through its usage of older languages and grammar gave it a feel of a book that had just been unearthed not a modern book .A worthy winner for the fist  shadow IFFP winner 2012."