Two Brits nominated for Booker Prize 2016
The shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize has been announced, with two British authors making the final six.
Canadian-British author David Szalay is in the running with All That Man Is, along with Hot Milk, a “richly mythic” tale about mothers and daughters by South Africanborn British writer Deborah Levy, who was shortlisted in 2012 for Swimming Home.
US novelist Paul Beatty’s satire on black life in America, The Sellout, is nominated, as is Canadian Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing, about China’s cultural revolution. Completing the shortlist is US author Ottessa Moshfegh’s debut novel Eileen and historical crime story His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet.
JM Coetzee’s The Schooldays of Jesus and Hystopia by David Means are among the longlisted novels not to make the shortlist.
First awarded in 1969, the Man Booker Prize is open to writers of any nationality, so long as their book was written in English and published in the UK. This year’s shortlist was chosen by a panel of five judges from 155 submissions published between 1 October 2015 and 30 September 2016.
Chair of the judges Amanda Foreman said: “This is a very exciting year. The range of books is broad and the quality is extremely high. Each novel provoked intense discussion and, at times, passionate debate, challenging our expectations of what a novel is and can be.
“From the historical to the contemporary, the satirical to the polemical, the novels in this list come from both established writers and new voices. The writing is uniformly fresh, energetic and important.”
Each author on the shortlist receives £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The winner, revealed at a black-tie dinner at London’s Guildhall and broadcast by the BBC on Tuesday 25 October, takes home £50,000.
Jamaican author Marlon James won last year’s grand prize with his third novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. The evocative book explores the attempted assassination of reggae singer Bob Marley in 1976 and its aftermath through the New York City crack wars of the Eighties. To date, more than 315,000 copies have been sold in the UK and Commonwealth. HBO is planning a TV adaptation of the story, while James has spent the past year travelling around the world to speak at a wide range of literary festivals.
Other past Man Booker Prize winners include Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel, Iris Murdoch and Salman Rushdie. THE INDEPENDENT