Independent foreign fiction prize 2013 shortlist announced

A funeral for the "golden age of Gutenberg" imagined by the Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas joins novels from South Africa, the Netherlands, Argentina, Croatia and Albania on the shortlist for the Independent foreign fiction prize.

Vila-Matas's Dublinesque, which follows a Catalan publisher as he travels to Dublin in the age of the internet to give literary culture its last rites, will compete with a formidable lineup of titles for the £10,000 prize, won in the past by giants of international literature Milan Kundera and WG Sebald. This year, Man Booker International prize winner Ismail Kadare is shortlisted for The Fall of the Stone City, in which German soldiers advance on the Albanian city of Gjirokastër in 1943, and the €100,000 Impac prize winner Gerbrand Bakker for The Detour, in which a woman retreats to Wales after an extramarital affair.

The Independent prize is for the book's author and its translator, with Vila-Matas's book translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean, Kadare's from the Albanian by John Hodgson, and Bakker's from the Dutch by David Colmer.

The award-winning Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, one of this year's judges, said the shortlist of six titles "reflects a mesmerising diversity of styles, genres and languages around the globe".

"What is common in all is the mellifluousness of the writing and the translation together, a boundless imagination, an eloquent prose and the ability to reach out to people across boundaries – be they national, religious, class or sexual," she said.

South African novelist and playwright Chris Barnard was picked for Bundu, in which drought forces hundreds of people to take refuge in a forgotten outpost, and Croatian author Daša Drndić for Trieste, in which an old woman waits to be reunited with the son who was fathered by an SS officer and stolen from her 62 years ago.

Argentinian writer Andrés Neuman, one of Granta's best young Spanish language novelists, was shortlisted for the epic Traveller of the Century – an apt choice for a prize rewarding literature in translation, as it deals with an affair between two literary translators, who together "build a language of understanding as they work to translate European poetry".

"In a world where a deeper cross-cultural understanding is a rarity and literature in translation is still not generating the interest it deserves, the Independent foreign fiction prize swims against the tide," said Shafak. "Right from the beginning it was a beautiful challenge to be on the judging panel."

The winner of the award will be announced on 20 May, with the winning author and translator to split the £10,000 equally. "This formidable shortlist highlights the richness and variety of fiction from across the globe, which readers here can enjoy and explore thanks to translators' incredible skill," said Arts Council England director of literature strategy Antonia Byatt. "We want readers to have access to the best of world fiction, in particular from languages and literatures under-represented in English. This shortlist encapsulates the excitement of looking outwards and discovering new and different voices."

The shortlist

Bundu by Chris Barnard, translated from the Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns (Alma Books)
The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer (Harvill Secker)
Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean (Harvill Secker)
The Fall of the Stone City by Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson (Canongate)
Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia (Pushkin Press)
Trieste by Daša Drndić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać (Maclehose Press)