PJE's Booker Blog

The 2019 Booker Prize Shortlist

The Booker Prize shortlist was announced this morning and somehow it seems even heavier than the longlist:

Margaret Atwood - The Testaments (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)
Lucy Ellmann - Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press)
Bernardine Evaristo - Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton)
Chigozie Obioma - An Orchestra of Minorities (Little Brown)
Salman Rushdie - Quichotte (Jonathan Cape)
Elif Shafak - 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (Viking)

This year's chair of judges Hay Festival director Peter Florence said that the six books "teem with life, with a profound and celebratory humanity", while Gaby Wood, Literary Director of the Booker Prize Foundation, said the judges have found "a set of novels that is political, orchestral, fearless, felt. And now, by association, those six will be in fruitful conversation with one another.”

The bookies seem to be baffled by it. Ladbrokes make Lucy Ellmann's thousand-page monologue the 3/1 favourite, whereas William Hill have her as the 10/1 outsider and Chigozie Obioma the favourite at 7/4. Both are offering 4/1 against Margaret Atwood who I imagine will attract some interest from punters. Little is yet known about The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, as it is not published until next week, and has been distributed on a need-to-read basis and subject to fierce non-disclosure agreements which may-or-may-not involve cattle-prods.

The £50,000 prize is now sponsored by Crankstart, a charitable foundation set up by Welsh-born Time-Magazine-journalist-turned-venture-capitalist-billionaire, Sir Michael Moritz and his wife, Harriet Heyman. The winner will be announced at the Guildhall in London on Monday 14th October.

posted by PJE @ 2:30 PM 0 comments

Booker Prize Longlist 2019

posted by PJE @ 7:15 PM 0 comments

Milkman delivers

Would the Americans complete a hat-trick of Man Booker wins? That was the $64,000¹ question at London's Guildhall on Tuesday² night. And the answer was nay.

The £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2018 was awarded to Anna Burns for her third novel Milkman (Faber & Faber) - making her the first writer from Northern Ireland to win the prize in this, its 50th anniversary year.

I was very impressed. Milkman offers insight into a divided community, explaining and exposing its parochial absurdities and the intimidation that sustains the divide. The lack of character names seemed clunky and annoyingly repetitive at first, but it is a device that helps the novel transcend a specific time or place. Names would place the characters on one side of the divide or the other. So ignore lazy blurbs describing it as a book set in Belfast in the 1970s, people in other divided communities around the world will recognize echoes of their situations as well.

The narrator is a young woman who likes to walk around with her head in a book - ususally a 19th century novel. This draws attention to herself in a society where you do not draw attention to yourself. Whether by 'reading-while-walking', or by being seen talking to someone you shouldn't be seen talking to. A community riddled with dangerous rumours and menacing groupthink. Pressure to conform. To be 'one of us' not 'one of them'. To obey arbitrary, unwritten, almost Gormenghastian rules.

In an interview for the official Man Booker website, Anna Burns explains that she "grew up in a place that was rife with violence, distrust and paranoia, and peopled by individuals trying to navigate and survive in that world as best as they could." Milkman conveys that with great style. As reviewer Claire Allfree put it: "If Beckett had written a prose poem about the Troubles, it would read a lot like this."

This year's judges (Kwame Anthony Appiah, Val McDermid, Leo Robson and Jacqueline Rose and Leanne Shapton) read 171 books - an absurd number - that's almost more than one per day - and are to be congratulated for finding Milkman and bringing it to all our attention.

For premature speculation about possible contenders for the 2019 prize keep an eye on: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/126184.Man_Booker_Prize_Eligible_2019

¹ Approximately. More like $65,000 unless the pound drops even further.
² Apologies for the delay. Sometimes I think the world is spinning a bit too fast for me to cling on.

posted by PJE @ 1:48 PM 0 comments

2018 Man Booker Prize Shortlist

The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize always seems like a bit of an anticlimax now that the longlist is revealed two months earlier, stealing all the excitement. But, for the record, here is the 2018 shortlist:

"All of our six finalists are miracles of stylistic invention. In each of them the language takes centre stage," said Kwame Anthony Appiah, this year's chair of the judges. "And, as is traditional, we have dropped the favourites," he didn't go on to say.

With the omission of Michael Ondaatje, there are no previous winners on the list, so there will be a 'new name on the trophy'. Esi Edugyan is the only author to have even been shortlisted before (for Half Blood Blues in 2011). And at the age of 27, Daisy Johnson has become the youngest person to be shortlisted (and the first to be born in the 1990's).

The winner will be announced at The Guildhall, London, on Tuesday 16th October. Let's hope there's not too much booing and food-throwing if an American wins for the third year in a row, just four years after they became eligible. The night before BBC4 will broadcast a documentary entitled "Barneys, Books and Bust Ups: 50 Years of the Booker Prize" which is described as "a tale of bruised egos and bickering judges".

posted by PJE @ 2:55 PM 0 comments

2018 Man Booker Prize Longlist

The longlist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize has been announced, with none of the usual suspects - and for the first time ever it includes a graphic novel (Sabrina by Nick Drnaso). The full list is:


"Every one of these books is wildly distinctive" according to the chair of this year's jury - the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. The other judges are the crime writer Val McDermid, graphic novelist Leanne Shapton and critics Leo Robson and Jacqueline Rose. They read 171 books - the most ever submitted. The shortlist will be revealed on September 20th, with the £50,000 prize winner revealed on October 16th at London’s Guildhall.

"All of these books – which take in slavery, ecology, missing persons, inner-city violence, young love, prisons, trauma, race – capture something about a world on the brink," Appiah said. In other words it's a depressing dystopian list which, following on from the decision of the judges of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction to withhold that prize because none of the novels made them all laugh, begs the question: is literary humour dead?

The bookies' favourite will surely be Michael Ondaatje, the only previous winner of the prize on the list, having shared the 1992 Booker prize with Barry Unsworth. "For a short time," he said, "I was a legend in my own lunchtime". Ondaatje also won the public vote to choose the 'Golden' Man Booker Prize earlier this month. The English Patient had been Kamila Shamsie's choice from the 1990s winners. The other shortlisted titles were: In a Free State by V.S Naipaul (chosen by Robert McCrum from he first decade of the prize); Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively (chosen by Lemn Sissay from the 1980s); Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (chosen by Simon Mayo from the 2000s); and Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (chosen by Hollie McNish from this decade).

Also since I last got around to blogging, the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk (along with translator Jennifer Croft) won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for Flights, and the judges for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize have been announced.

As always there are many excellent novels that didn't make the longlist. I am most disappointed by the omission of Travelling In A Strange Land by David Park - a beautiful, touching novel which, if you haven't already read it, should be on your Christmas list. Unless this miserable burning world ends before then.

posted by PJE @ 1:14 PM 1 comments