A dictator, a princess and an adman star in novels vying for 'Independent' prize

An epic account of the overthrow of a brutal tyrant joins a scorching satire on the advertising industry and a revelatory novel about an adulterous English princess among titles shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

The £10,000 award, supported by Arts Council England and Champagne Taittinger in addition to The Independent, is Britain's leading honour for novels in translation by contemporary authors. Last year, the prize went to the late W G Sebald for his final masterpiece, Austerlitz.

This year's shortlist features The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist's acclaimed dramatisation of the dictatorship of General Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and the plot that ended his savage regime.

The book will compete with £9.99 (originally entitled "99 Francs") by the French literary enfant terrible Frédéric Beigbeder, which depicts the mayhem of a cocaine-fuelled ad- man's life as it skewers the dishonesty of his trade.

The Visit of the Royal Physician by the Swedish author Per Olov Enquist retells the amazing story of the younger sister of George III, who became Queen of Denmark, fell in love with a progressive doctor and helped instigate a short-lived Danish revolution.

Also on the shortlist is Jose Carlos Somoza's The Athenian Murders, an ingenious whodunit set in ancient Greece which has won the Gold Dagger award of the UK Crime Writers' Association, and the Nobel prize-winning Portuguese writer Jose Saramago for his fable of consumerism and control in a globalised culture, The Cave.

The US-based German novelist Peter Stephan Jungk wins a place for The Snowflake Constant, his tale of an eccentric mathematician's doomed search for truth.

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, which will be awarded at a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall, London, on 7 April, is divided equally between the winning author and translator.

This year's judges are Professor Susan Bassnett of Warwick University; the novelist Ahdaf Soueif; the poet Jack Mapanje; Amanda Hopkinson, the international literature officer of Arts Council England; and the literary editor of The Independent, Boyd Tonkin.

* Julia Darling, 46, a poet, playwright and novelist from Newcastle upon Tyne, has won the £60,000 Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award for writers in the North-east.

The shortlisted titles

£9.99 by Frédéric Beigbeder, translator: Adriana Hunter (Picador)

Cleverly transplanted from Paris to London, Beigbeder's rabidly funny, angry assault on advertising and its servants descends from commercial break to cultural breakdown.

The Visit of the Royal Physician by Per Olov Enquist, translator: Tiina Nunnally (Harvill)

In 18th-century Denmark, a bold English princess outrages a court and provokes a brief revolution when she falls for a radical doctor in this drama of passions and ideas.

The Snowflake Constant by Peter Stephan Jungk, translator: Michael Hofmann (Faber & Faber)

A mathematician in crisis sets off on a tragi-comic journey in this off-beat and enchanting quest for meaning in a muddled universe.

The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa, translator: Edith Grossman (Faber & Faber)

The Peruvian master brings all his force and fire to this exciting, terrifying epic of dictatorship and revolt, recalled by an exiled lawyer seeking to recover her traumatic past.

The Cave by Jose Saramago, translator: Margaret Jull Costa (Harvill)

Portugal's Nobel laureate turns his philosophical eye and haunting prose on consumer culture in this tale of a potter who is stranded in a sinister, dystopian, living-shopping "Centre".

The Athenian Murders by Jose Carlos Somoza, translator: Sonia Soto (Abacus)

Crime fiction entwines with literary puzzles as a "decipherer" in ancient Athens investigates a killing, while a modern scholar sinks into a menacing labyrinth of his own.