Husband-and-wife publishers hope for Booker win two years running

A SMALL husband-and-wife publishing team could pull off an unprecedented coup and take home one of the world’s biggest literary prizes for the second year running.

Bloomsbury-based Oneworld take their place on the 13-strong longlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize with their title The Sellout, Paul Beatty’s racially charged satire on modern America.

The firm, which published last year’s winner Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, was founded by Novin Doostdar and Juliet Mabey after he quit his job in the City 30 years ago.

They are among five independent publishers on the list, which also fea- tures four debut novelists and an even split of five UK writers and five from the US, with three from the Commonwealth.

Among the writers in the running for the £50,000 prize are two-time winner JM Coetzee and AL Kennedy, who was one of the judges 20 years ago. Her novel,l SeriousSi Sweet,S shows 24 hours in the lives of two Londoners wandering the streets of the city and trying to hold their lives together despite divorce and a battle with drink.

Historian Amanda Foreman, who is chairing this year’s judging panel, said it had been an “exciting year” for books. She said: “The range of books is broad and the quality extremely high. Each novel provoked intense discussion and, at times, passionate debate, challenging our expectations of what a novel is and can be.

“The novels in this list come from both est abli shed writers and new voices. The writing is uniformly fresh, energetic and important. It is a longlist to be relished.”

Among the big names conspicuous by their absence from the list are Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Americans Don DeLillo and Jonathan Safran Foer.

A shortlist of six books is revealed on September 13 with the winner announced at a black tie dinner in Guildhall on October 25.

As well as the cash prize, the publicity around the award almost guarantees the winning book bestseller status.

A Brief History of Seven Killings has sold more than 315,000 copies to date in the UK and Commonwealth.