Victoria’s Edugyan up for Man Booker Prize

TORONTO — Victoria-based author Esi Edugyan has made the long list for this year’s Man Booker Prize in London.

Edugyan made this year’s long list for Washington Black, which will be released in Canada in September.

Edugyan was also on the Booker short list in 2011 for HalfBlood Blues, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Toronto-based Michael Ondaatje also made the Booker list of 13 titles with Warlight, published by Jonathan Cape. The honour comes just two weeks after he won the Golden Man Booker Prize, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the award.

The Golden Man Booker placed the prize’s previous 51 winners in a head-to-head battle to determine which has stood the test of time. Ondaatje’s The English Patient won the Booker in 1992.

The short list of six books will be announced on Sept. 20 and the winner of the prize, worth about $86,000, will be announced Oct. 16.

This year’s Booker long list also includes six writers from the U.K., three from the U.S. and two from Ireland.

A panel of five judges chose the long list from 171 submissions — the highest number of titles put forward in the prize’s history.

Edugyan’s Washington Black tells the story of an 11-year-old slave on a Barbados sugar plantation whose master is obsessed with developing a machine that can fly.

“A dazzling exploration of race in the Atlantic world, which also manages to be a yarn and a chase story. A book of extraordinary political and racial scope, Washington Black is wonderfully written, extremely imaginative, profoundly engaging and filled with an empathetic understanding of characters who are uprooted from places they knew and required to make adjustments in worlds they could barely have dreamt of. It manages to keep you on the edge of your seat, while making you, as a reader, want to savour every moment,” the judges said.

The judges called Ondaatje’s novel “wonderfully atmospheric” and “beautifully paced.

The prize is open to writers of any nationality, writing in English and published in the U.K. and Ireland.

TIMES COLONIST Esi Edugyan has made the long list for the Man Booker Prize for her novel Washington Black.