Karl Ove Knausgaard and Haruki Murakami both make their third appearances at the celebrity end of the longlist for the Independent foreign fiction prize. On a list dominated by German writers, Norwegian Knausgaard and Japanese Murakami appear respectively for Boyhood Island and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

Both novels were already bestsellers in their original languages, and were published last year to the sort of fanfare that is rarely seen outside Hogwarts. Fans queued round the block for the midnight release of Murakami’s novel, about a lonely young man who is traumatised by his ostracism by a close group of friends. Knausgaard’s Boyhood Island, the third volume of his autobiographical novel sequence My Struggle, has sold 500,000 copies in Norway, which has a population of just 5 million, and is being released at yearly intervals in English.

Five of the longlisted books are translated from German. They include Timur Vermes’s Look Who’s Back, a comedy about Hitler waking up in 2011; F by Daniel Kehlmann, about two brothers with nothing in common; and The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, which imagines alternative lives for a woman in the 20th century. Alongside them are The Giraffe’s Neck by Judith Schalansky, about a biology teacher who finds her Darwinian beliefs challenged when her school is threatened, and Tiger Milk by Stefanie de Velasco, about two best friends growing up.

More than 100 novels from 28 languages were submitted for the prize, which is now in its 25th year. In addition to Murakami, Asian literature is represented by The Investigation by Jung-Myung Lee, about a murder at a Korean prison in 1944, and The Last Lover by Chinese writer Can Xue, a tale of a series of husbands, wives and lovers. Africa is represented by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, a leading light of the Equatorial Guinean literature movement, whose novel By Night the Mountain Burns tells of a childhood on a remote west African island. Colombian Tomás González represents latin America with In the Beginning Was the Sea, a first novel originally published in 1983.

All the rest are European, with one novel each from Swedish, Russian, Dutch and Italian.

The longlist in full

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker), translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel

Boyhood Island by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Harvill Secker), translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett

The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck (Portobello Books) translated from German by Susan Bernofsky

The Giraffe’s Neck by Judith Schalansky (Bloomsbury), translated from German by Shaun Whiteside

F by Daniel Kehlmann (Quercus), translated from German by Carol Brown Janeway

Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes (MacLehose Press), translated from German by Jamie Bulloch

Tiger Milk by Stefanie de Velasco (Head of Zeus), translated from German by Tim Mohr

In the Beginning Was the Sea by Tomás González (Pushkin Press), translated from Spanish by Frank Wynne

The Ravens by Tomas Bannerhed (The Clerkenwell Press), translated from Swedish by Sarah Death

Bloodlines by Marcello Fois (MacLehose Press), translated from Italian by Silvester Mazzarella

The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov (Peirene Press), translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield

While the Gods Were Sleeping by Erwin Mortier (Pushkin Press), translated from Dutch by Paul Vincent

The Investigation by Jung-Myung Lee (Mantle), translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim

The Last Lover by Can Xue (Margellos World Republic of Letters), translated from Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen

By Night the Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel (And Other Stories), translated from Spanish by Jethro Soutar