Books that have won Foreign Literacy Prizes

[Dark Muse]

I belong to this online reading group called Reading the Classics and for the year of 2016 they are having this fun reading challenge. They created a Bingo Board and each square is a different topic and you have to try and read a classical novel which fits into each of the topics.

One of the topics is Winner of a Foreign Literary Prize (For me that would be any Non-American book award).

There are countless different book prizes out there some of which I probably never even heard of so instead of trying to search through each of them or looking up every Foreign book I have to see if it won a prize I thought I would go to Lit Net to get some recommendations.

So I am interested in any classical novel which has one a Foreign (for me) Book Prize that you think is really worth reading.

[Bill 42]

Hopefully your definition of "classical novel" includes novels that are fairly recent, as book prizes seem to be all less than 100 years old. The Pulitzer (the oldest that I know of) was first offered in 1917 and first awarded in 1918, so if your definition of "classical novel" includes "at least 100 years old" you're in for quite the search.

Anyway, here are my recommendations:

• Three Came to Ville Marie by Alan Sullivan. It won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction (GG, Canadian Award) in 1941. It's about the different personalities that survive and thrive in Europe and North America in the 19th century.
• The Tin Flute by Gabrielle Roy. It won the GG in 1947, and was also included in Peter Boxall's 1001 Books list.
• The Fall of a Titan by Igor Gouzenko. It won the GG in 1954. Gouzenko was a Russian national working for the Soviet Embassy in Canada in 1945, when he defected taking secret documents on Soviet espionage in the western world. This started the Cold War. The novel is about the rise and fall of a soviet national recruited for politics.
• The Diviners by Margaret Laurence. It won the GG in 1974, and was also included in Peter Boxall's 1001 Books list.
• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. It won the Man Booker Prize (MB, Britain and the Commonwealth) in 1981, and is included in a bunch of top 100 lists.
• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. It won the GG in 1985, and was also included in Peter Boxall's 1001 Books list.
• The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. It won the GG and the MB in 1992, and was also included in Peter Boxall's 1001 Books list.
• The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. It won the GG in 1993 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 (which might exclude it from your requirements), and was also included in Peter Boxall's 1001 Books list.
• A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. It won the Giller Prize (GP, Canadian award) in 1995, and was also included in Peter Boxall's 1001 Books list.
• Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. It won the GP in 1996, and was also included in Peter Boxall's 1001 Books list.
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. It won the MB in 2000, and was also included in Peter Boxall's 1001 Books list.
• Vernon God Little by D.B.C. Pierre. It won the MB in 2003, and was also included in Peter Boxall's 1001 Books list.
• A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. It won the GG in 2004. It also won the Canada Reads competition in 2006, which is a reality television show about reading (really, I'm not kidding - a reality TV show about reading, with celebrities and books being voted off and everything!).

My favorite of the bunch is The Fall of a Titan.

[Dark Muse]

Thanks a lot for the great suggestions. I do believe that more recent classics are countable for the challenge.

[kev67]

The only Booker Prize winner I have read was Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Some of the others look interesting, e.g. Wolf Hall, Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel; Oscar and Luscinda by Peter Carey, The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis.

I also looked up the Costa Book awards. I liked The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. This is a book about an autistic boy who tries to find out what happened to a neighbour's dog. I cannot remember all that much about it, but it is quite an easy read. Some people on this site said how much they liked the 2014 winner, H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald. This book was praised a lot on the radio.

[ennison]

Le Feu - Barbusse
La Condition Humaine - Malraux
Les Dernier des Justes - Schwarz-Bart
Le Roi des Aulnes- Tournier
Les Bienveillantes- Littel
These all won a prize in France. They have all been translated. I liked all of them. I concede that Littell's novel is about a hundred pages too long but it is a big achievement

Ps The predictive text wanted me to write Schwarzenegger instead of Schwarz-Bart. I find that comic but that is just me I guess.

[Eiseabhal]

Ernie would write a series all ending with .....

[ennison]

I'll be back ?