This year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize of £10,000 has been awarded Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker and his translator David Colmer for Detour, published by Bloomsbury. The ‘mesmeric’ and ‘haunting’ novel beat off stiff competition from a prestigious shortlist: Bundu by Chris Barnard, translated from the Afrikaans by Michael Heyns; Trieste by Daša Drndić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac; The Fall of the Stone City by Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson; Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia; and Dublinesque, translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean.
David Colmer and Gerbrand Bakker previously won the €100,000 IMPAC prize for The Twin in 2010.