On May 27th, the winner of the eighth annual Best Translated Book Awards was announced at Book Expo America. The winner for the fiction category - from a longlist of twenty-five titles was Can Xue's The Last Lover (translated from Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen).  As explained on their website, the Best Translated Book Award is an American literary award launched by Three Percent in 2007 to bring attention to the best original works of international fiction and poetry published in the U.S. during the previous year. 

You're probably wondering why I'm bringing up this award? Well, when I was checking out the 2015 longlist I noticed two novels by African authors on the list. Naturally, this got me curious about what the other longlists were like in terms of African authors. So, I went back to the first longlist in 2008, scrolled through the past lists and here are the 12 books (including the 2 from this year's longlist) I spotted.* 



I may have only been able to find 12, but from young women in an elite boarding school in Rwanda to suicide bombers in Morocco and a white woman and her black domestic worker in South Africa, the Best Translated Book Awards have a delightful selection of translated African fiction on their longlists. So why not give some of these works - from Angola, Djibouti, Egypt, Rwanda, Morocco, and South Africa - a try. Read on to find out more.