New chapter for Man Booker author who read first novel in an airport lounge

HE MIGHT not have read his first novel until he was 18, but it hasn’t stopped Sunjeev Sahota earning a place on the Man Booker Prize 2015 shortlist.

The Leeds author, who has been nominated for his second novel The Year of the Runaways, is one of just two Britons vying for literature’s prestigious £50,000 prize. Sahota, whose book tells the story of migrant workers in Sheffield, made the final cut after the 13-strong longlist was whittled down to just six titles.

When the 34-year-old’s debut novel, Ours Are The Streets, was published in 2011 he admitted that he hadn’t read a novel until he left school, only picking up a copy of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children while flying out to visit relatives in India.

Sahota is joined on the shortlist by fellow Briton Tom McCarthy for Satin Island. Jamaican Marlon James was also named for A Brief History of Seven Killers, along with Nigerian Chigozie Obioma, for The Fisherman and Two Americans, Anne Tyler for A Spool of Blue Thread and Hanya Yanagihara for A Little Life.

With themes of murder, heartbreak, jealousy and violence, having re-read all 13 books, Michael Wood, chairman of the judging panel, admitted that “quite frankly, they are pretty grim”.

“There is a tremendous amount of violence,” he added. “This is why I think it is quite interesting to work out how the reader can have such pleasure in books when such terrible stuff happens.” This is the second year the prize, billed as ‘fiction at its finest’, has been open to writers of any nationality writing in English and published in the UK.

Following the announcement Yanagihara immediately became the hot favourite to win the world’s biggest literary award with William Hill cutting her odds from 2/1 to 6/4. Sahota, along with Obioma, is currently a 10/1 outsider.

However, the Man Booker judging panel is notoriously difficult to second guess and the winning novel will only be unveiled on October 15.