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The oldest and youngest opponents ever nominated are in the race for this year’s Booker fiction award as judges on Tuesday published a longlist bereft of some major names. The selection of 13 books will be reduced down to a shortlist on September 6, before the famous British prize is bestowed on October 17, offering its recipient a career-changing boost in sales and public recognition.
The prize presentation in London overlaps with the 88th birthday of Alan Garner, who earned his mark with children’s fantasy works and folk retellings.
After 60 years in print, the Englishman wins his first Booker consideration this year for “Treacle Walker”. Meanwhile, at the age of 20, US author Leila Mottley has been nominated twice for “Nightcrawling”.
Ms Mottley is one of 3 debut fiction writers on the list, alongside Britain’s Maddie Mortimer (“Maps of our Spectacular Bodies”) and American writer Selby Wynn Schwartz (“After Sappho”) (“After Sappho”).
At 116 pages, Irish novelist Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like These” is the shortest novel acknowledged in the Booker prize’s 53-year history.
NoViolet Bulawayo, Karen Joy Fowler, and Graeme Macrae Burnet are initially longlisted authors who made the grade this year.
But other prominent names were missing, notably Jennifer Egan, Ian McEwan, and Hanya Yanagihara, with the judges leaning primarily towards smaller, independent publishers.
“The list which we have chosen offers story, fable and parable, fantasy, mystery, contemplation, and thriller,” the Booker panel’s chair, British cultural historian Neil MacGregor, said in a statement.
He said the longlist — drawn from an initial total of 169 novels submitted by publishers — includes conversation of contemporary themes such as the Covid pandemic and questions of racial and gender injustice.
Some other latter-day concern tends to revolve around “post-truth” politics often crops up.
“The magnitude to which we can confide the word, either spoken written, is in many of these books the central topic under examination,” MacGregor said.
African authors have been prevalent in English-language fiction, snatching the Nobel, Booker, and Goncourt prizes last year.
If the trend continues, it might prefer “Glory” by Zimbabwe’s Bulawayo on the Booker list for 2022, which comprises eight women and five males.
Shehan Karunatilaka from Sri Lanka is the only other shortlisted author not from the British Isles or the United States, with “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”.
The Booker is Britain’s top literary prize for books published in English. Its former honorees include Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, and Hilary Mantel.
