The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
British author youngest to make Man Booker list
British author Daisy Johnson has become the youngest author to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
The 27-year-old, one of the six on the shortlist for the literary fiction prize, has been recognised for her book Everything Under.
The other five authors on the list are British author Anna Burns for Milkman, Canadian author Esi Edugyan for Washington Black and Scottish poet Robin Robertson for The Long Take.
Announcing the shortlist at a press conference in London, the chairman of this year’s judging panel, Kwame Anthony Appiah, said: “All of our six finalists are miracles of stylistic invention. In each of them the language takes centre stage. And yet in every other respect they are remarkably diverse, exploring a multitude of subjects ranging across space and time.”
The list of 13 authors from the longlist announced in July this year was whittled down to the final six by the five-strong judging panel comprised of
“All our finalists are miracles of stylistic invention”
Appiah, as well as Scottish crime writer Val McDermid, cultural critic Leo Robson, writer and critic Jacqueline Rose and graphic novelist Leanne Shapton.
Works chosen this year encompass slavery, imprisonment, sectarian violence, and the acute dependence of humans on the natural and its coming catastrophe.
Johnson’s Everything Under tells the tale of a girl living on a canal boat, mixing memory and “personal mythologies” as she looks back to her youth and examines language.
McDermid said that the novel is summarised by the word “fluidity”, in myth, story and in gender, in a retelling of the tragic Oedipus myth.The Man Booker Prize for fiction was first awarded in 1969 and the winner will be announced on October 16.