Highland murder tale tipped for this year’s Booker Prize win
edinburgh — A tale of murder and class warfare in the Scottish Highlands by a little-known novelist is one of the favourites to win this year’s Booker Prize for literature on Tuesday.
His Bloody Project, the second novel by Scottish author Graeme Macrae Burnet, has been outselling the other five nominees, leaving its small Glasgow-based publisher struggling to meet demand.
“One of the great side-effects of being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize is the interest that it has created abroad,” Burnet told AFP in an interview before the ceremony for the prestigious English-language literary award.
His novel tells the gritty story of a young and poor tenant farmer who murders the village administrator and his family. The social hierarchy of 19th-century rural Scotland — dominated by aristocratic landowners — is a key feature of the book.
“The initial idea, which has been in my head for 30 years, came from the case of Pierre Riviere, a French peasant in the early 19th century who killed three members of his own family and then wrote a rather eloquent account of what he had done,” said Burnet.
The bookmakers’ two other favourites are South African-born Briton Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk and Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing.
Among the other shortlisted novels is Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, a satirical novel set in a fictional neighbourhood of his native Los Angeles, which explores racial equality and the civil rights movement.
Burnet said he was undaunted by the limelight and curious to see how the novel would resonate with different audiences internationally. He said a Chinese journalist had told him that the book’s “oppressive atmosphere” reminded her of Mao’s China and the condition of Chinese peasants.
“That sort of Kafkaesque notion of the arbitrary use of power and regulations has actually filtered very much into His Bloody Project’,” said Burnet, who lived in Kafka’s native Prague for a while. –