The Independent Foreign Prize honours the best work of fiction by a living author, which has been translated into English from any other language and published in the United Kingdom. Uniquely, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize gives the winning author and translator equal status: each receives £5,000.

First awarded in 1990 to Orhan Pamuk and translator Victoria Holbrook for The White Castle, the Prize ran until 1995 and was then revived in 2000 with the support of Arts Council England, who continue to fund the award. The 2012 prize was won by Aharon Appelfeld and translator Jeffrey M Green for Blooms of Darkness.

Khaled Khalifa’s In Praise of Hatred, banned in Syria, has made the longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2013.

The book – published secretly in Damascus and banned forty days later – was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008. Set in and around 1980s Aleppo, the story unpicks a life lived under dictatorship and loudly echoes the violence across the Middle East and the Arab world over the past two years. The translation into English by Leri Price is joined on the 16-strong longlist by Orhan Pamuk – who won the first Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1990 and has subsequently been shortlisted twice – and Ismail Kadare, who won the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005.

The longlist also features Diego Marani, one of Italy’s leading contemporary authors, who was shortlisted for this Prize last year with New Finnish Grammar. Independent publishers are well represented with 11 different houses represented on the list. Harvill Secker also have a bumper year taking four of the slots, and finally Transworld with one. Translator Anne McLean appears twice for her work on The Sound of Things Falling, by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas, on which she collaborated with Rosalind Harvey. The longlist features books translated from 13 different languages including Croatian, Norwegian, Hungarian, and Afrikaans.

A shortlist of six books will be announced on Thursday 11 April and the overall winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2013 will be announced at an awards ceremony in central London in May at the Royal Institute of British Architects.