THE ENGLISH translation of Rivers of Babylon, by Slovak writer Peter Pišťanek, was long-listed for the British Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Sme daily wrote.
The prize was founded to honour translated fiction, which makes up only 4 percent of the books published in Great Britain.
But in the end, the prize went to Omega Minor by Paul Verhaeghen, a Belgian living in the United States. The novel, originally in Flemish, deals with the period from Nazism to the 1990s.
Pištanek published Rivers of Babylon in 1991. Considered a satire of both socialism and capitalism, it is the story of a small-town loser who becomes an enterprising gangster after the fall of communism. It was made into a movie in 1998.
The book's English version was translated by Peter Petro, a professor at the University of British Columbia, and published in Great Britain in November 2007.
