Two Asian authors on Booker Prize longlist

BRITISH Asian Sunjeev Sahota is among 13 authors longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize for fiction for China Room, a novel judges described as a “brilliant twist” on the immigrant experience.

Sahota, 40, has previously been shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize for his book, The Year of the Runaways and is a winner of the European Union Prize for Literature in 2017.

Sahota’s grandparents emigrated from Punjab in the 1960s.

His novel China Room was chosen from 158 published in the UK or Ireland between October 2020 and September 2021. The Booker Prize is open to works by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.

“Weaving together two timelines and two continents, China Room struck us as a brilliant twist on the novel of immigrant experience, considering in subtle and moving ways the trauma handed down from one generation to the next,” the Booker

Prize judges said on Tuesday (27).

“In crisp, clean prose, and with a dash of melodramatic action, Sahota turns these heavy themes into something filled with love, hope and humour,” they said.

Sahota is joined on the longlist by previous winner British Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro for Klara and the Sun and other previously shortlisted authors South African Damon Galut for The Promise and American Richard Powers for Bewilderment.

The 13 books on this year’s longlist also include A Passage North by Sri Lankan author Anuk Arudpragasam; Second Place by British-Canadian author Rachel Cusk; The Sweetness of Water by American writer Nathan Harris;

An Island by South African Karen Jennings; A Town Called Solace by Canadian Maya Lawson; No One is Talking About this by American Patricia Lockdwood;

The Fortune Men by British-Somali Nadifa Mohamed; Great Circle by American Maggie Shipstead; and Light Perpetual by

British Francis Spufford. “One thing that unites these books is their power to absorb the reader in an unusual story, and to do so in an artful, distinctive voice,” said historian Maya Jasanoff, chair of the 2021 judging panel.

A shortlist of six books will be announced in London on September 14 and those authors will receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book.

The 2021 winner, who will receive £50,000, will be announced on November 3.