Booker Prize Non-Binary Surprise

 

To the gasps of the crowd in London’s Guildhall last night, Margaret Atwood (for The Testaments) and Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other) were announced as joint winners of the £50,000 Booker Prize for 2019, after the judges refused to compromise. The prize has been split before – in 1974 and 1992, the latter occasion leading to a rule being introduced forbidding joint winners. But hey, that was in the days of the patriarchy, we’re all cool and non-binary now.

Thus Margaret Atwood became the oldest person, and Bernardine Evaristo the first black woman, to win the prize. Quite why the judges couldn’t just give it to Bernardine Evaristo is hard to understand. It seemed a rather sentimental decision to chuck another prize Margaret Atwood’s way – as she said herself, she doesn’t really need the attention.

There was a growing consensus in favour of Girl, Woman, Other – a “joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary” stories of twelve characters in modern Britain, so they made the right decision I think, and the fact that I am definitely going to finish reading it unlike

 

 

The 2019 Booker Prize Shortlist

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

Margaret Atwood (Canada) – The Testaments (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)
Lucy Ellmann (USA/UK) – Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press)
Bernardine Evaristo (UK) – Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton)
Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria) – An Orchestra of Minorities (Little Brown)
Salman Rushdie (UK/India) – Quichotte (Jonathan Cape)
Elif Shafak (UK/Turkey) – 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.

Booker Prize Longlist 2019

…and another reason I hate longlists, sorry, where was I?

Anyway, I wrote this sitting in the kitchen sink. Well, almost. Tis hot here.

The 2019 Booker Prize longlist was revealed at midnight, and it’s a heavyweight list:

Margaret Atwood (Canada) – The Testaments (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)
Kevin Barry (Ireland) – Night Boat to Tangier (Canongate Books)
Oyinkan Braithwaite (UK/Nigeria) – My Sister, The Serial Killer (Atlantic Books)
Lucy Ellmann (USA/UK) – Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press)
Bernardine Evaristo (UK) – Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton)
John Lanchester (UK) – The Wall (Faber & Faber)
Deborah Levy (UK) – The Man Who Saw Everything (Hamish Hamilton)
Valeria Luiselli (Mexico/Italy) – Lost Children Archive (4th Estate)
Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria) – An Orchestra of Minorities (Little Brown)
Max Porter (UK) – Lanny (Faber & Faber)
Salman Rushdie (UK/India) – Quichotte (Jonathan Cape)
Elif Shafak (UK/Turkey) – 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (Viking)
Jeanette Winterson (UK) – Frankissstein (Jonathan Cape)

I say revealed at midnight, lots of book retailers were in the know for who knows how long, but hey make me try to get online in the middle of a hot night, why don’t you?

The judges this year are chaired by Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival. He is joined by Liz Calder, co-founder of Bloomsbury, the novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo, writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch, and the pianist and composer Joanna MacGregor. They read 151 novels.

I have only read two so far, but of those, Frankissstein would be my tip for the prize. It combines the historic with the futuristic, a lightness of touch with depth of intellect, and is outrageously funny. It’s astonishing that Jeanette Winterson has not been longlisted for the Booker before now (as far as I can tell – longlists were not published before 2001.) Ali Smith’s Spring ought to have been on the list as well, but it looks like she hasn’t changed her mind about withdrawing her work from consideration.

The most literally heavyweight tome on this literary heavyweight list is supplied by the only American to make the cut: Lucy Ellmann, whose Ducks, Newburyport is a thousand page single-sentence stream of consciousness. She deserves some kind of prize just for the line “Super callous fragile racist sexist Nazi Potus” about a certain half-man-half-goldfish. As does everyone who manages to read it all.

I look forward to reading Sir Salman Rushdie ‘reimagining’ Don Quixote and Margaret Atwood’s long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale – perhaps the literary publishing event of the year. Peter Florence described The Testaments as “terrifying and exhilarating.” Although we have a long wait to find out just how, as it will not be published until September 10th – a week after the announcement of the shortlist on Tuesday 3rd September.

The winner will be announced on Monday 14th October at an awards ceremony at London’s Guildhall.

In other Booker news Jokha Alharthi and translator Marilyn Booth won the £50,000 Man Booker International Prize 2019 for Celestial Bodies, published by the small Scottish publisher Sandstone Press.

It was the last to be sponsored by the Man Group, with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Sir Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman’s charitable foundation Crankstart taking over sponsorship of the Booker Prizes in a five-year deal.

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.

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:

Milkman by Anna Burns (UK) (Faber & Faber)
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (Canada) (Serpent’s Tail)
Everything Under by Daisy Johnson (UK) (Jonathan Cape)
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner (USA) (Jonathan Cape)
The Overstory by Richard Powers (USA) (Willian Heinemann)
The Long Take by Robin Robertson (UK) (Picador)

“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”.

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:

Snap by Belinda Bauer (UK) (Bantam Press)
Milkman by Anna Burns (UK) (Faber & Faber)
Sabrina by Nick Drnaso (USA) (Granta Books)
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (Canada) (Serpent’s Tail)
In Our Mad And Furious City by Guy Gunaratne (UK) (Tinder Press)
Everything Under by Daisy Johnson (UK) (Jonathan Cape)
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner (USA) (Jonathan Cape)
The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh (UK) (Hamish Hamilton)
Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (Canada) (Jonathan Cape)
The Overstory by Richard Powers (USA) (William Heinemann)
The Long Take by Robin Robertson (UK) (Picador)
Normal People by Sally Rooney (Ireland) (Faber & Faber)
From A Low And Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan (Ireland) (Doubleday Ireland)

“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.

The Golden Man Booker Prize

2018 marks the 50th anniversary of the first Booker Prize and as part of the celebrations The Booker Prize Foundation are awarding a ‘Golden Man Booker Prize‘. All of the previous 51 winning titles (there were joint winners in 1974 and 1992) will be reassessed to gauge which has best “stood the test of time, remaining relevant to readers today”.

Five judges will pick the best winner from each decade and their shortlist will be announced at the Hay Festival on May 26th. This ‘Golden Five’ will then be put to a public vote on the official Man Booker website and the winner announced during the Man Booker 50 Festival which takes place on the weekend of the 6th-8th July at London’s Southbank Centre.

Of the five judges, the BBC Radio 2 broadcaster (and writer of teenage fiction) Simon Mayo has the easiest job: picking the best winner from the 2000s which, as we all know, is Wolf Hall. The poet Lemn Sissay will be considering the 1980s winners, which includes Salman Rushdie’s Booker-of-Bookers champion Midnight’s Children and my favourite winner The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.

The writer and editor Robert McCrum will consider the first twelve winners (1969-79), while poet Hollie McNish will choose from the eight most recent (since 2010). Novelist Kamila Shamsie might have the most awkward decision to make, as she will be revisiting the 1990s – the decade in which Booker judges failed even to shortlist all the most memorable titles (Regeneration, Birdsong, The Shipping News, Trainspotting, A Suitable Boy, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Enduring Love, etc.)

I think the big-hitters, the ones to beat, are probably:

In A Free State – VS Naipaul (1971)
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (1981)
The God Of Small Things – Arundhati Roy (1997)
Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel (2009)
A Brief History of Seven Killings – Marlon James (2015)

If it were up to me, rather than re-rewarding a previous winner, there would be a prize for the best runner-up. My ‘Silver Five’ would look like this:

Impossible Object – Nicholas Mosley (1969)
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (1986)
Quarantine – Jim Crace (1997)
Unless – Carol Shields (2002)
Darkmans – Nicola Barker (2007)

Yes, I’ve cheated there, but I don’t think anything from the 2010s would stand much chance in that company. And, obviously, in a public vote, The Handmaid’s Tale would win by a landslide, so perhaps I should choose Flaubert’s Parrot instead. Unless has one of the greatest first paragraphs I have ever read, and maybe if it had won the Booker, the whole #MeToo phenomenon might have happened years ago.

Before the Golden Booker though, there is the longlist for the Man Booker International Prize which will be announced on March 12th, followed by the shortlist one month later, and the winner on 22nd May.

The longlist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize itself will be revealed later in July, with this year’s judges being philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (chair), alongside crime writer Val McDermid, graphic novelist Leanne Shapton and critics Leo Robson and Jacqueline Rose. As per usual the shortlist will be revealed in September, with the £50,000 prize winner revealed on October 16th.

George Saunders wins the 2017 Man Booker Prize

The £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2017 was awarded to George Saunders last night for his first full length goddamn novel Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury). A field geophysicist from Amarillo, Texas, who quit “swimming in […] monkey shit […] to try and be Kerouac II“, Saunders has been well-known in America for twenty years thanks to his humorous (and often dystopic) short stories. Lincoln in the Bardo is the “Scary Artistic Project He Desperately Longed to Attempt”.

This means that the prize has been won by an American writer for the second successive year, only four years after the prize was opened up to writers from outside the Commonwealth. Interestingly, that decision to open up the prize was seen as being a response to the inauguration of the Folio Prize in 2014, which included Americans – and short-story collections. And who won that first Folio Prize? George Saunders for his short story collection Tenth of December. Of that book, Saunders told Slate.com that at least three of the stories were intended to be novels, “until they came to their senses. That seems to be the definition of ‘novel’ for me: a story that hasn’t yet discovered a way to be brief.”

Lincoln in the Bardo depicts the events of the night Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie died (February 22nd, 1862) in a genuinely innovative and, ultimately, moving way using quotations from historical works (some real, some fictional, some amusingly contradictory) and a myriad of spectral perspectives (apparently there are 166 different voices heard in the novel). Despite such a frightening-sounding conceit it is beautifully readable – as Saunders told The Guardian: “the writer doesn’t need to throw a party in every sentence”. Although I disagree with the decision to open the prize to Americans, there is no doubt that the judges have picked the right book: it is a ‘fittingly dazzling‘ winner.

For premature speculation about who the contenders for the 2018 prize might be keep an eye on:  https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/115479.Man_Booker_Prize_Eligible_2018

And let’s hope that Ali Smith isn’t serious about not submitting her books for the prize in future.

2017 Man Booker Prize Shortlist

The surprising shortist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize has been announced,  it looks like this:

Paul Auster – 4 3 2 1
Emily Fridlund – History of Wolves
Mohsin Hamid – Exit West
Fiona Mozley – Elmet
George Saunders – Lincoln in the Bardo
Ali Smith – Autumn

My favourite band are releasing a single next month, for the first time in many years. It makes me want to bang my head against a wall – not in a heavy metal way, but in a why-have-they-done-that-it-is-the-worst-song-on-the-album way. I suspect many people will feel the same about this shortlist, culled from what was probably the strongest Booker longlist ever. There will also be murmurs of ‘told you so’ with regard to it being 50% American.

I didn’t make a prediction this year, but if I had it would probably have been the same as this one: https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/the-booker-shortlist-2017-who-ll-be-on-it-1.627345 – almost entirely wrong. It is as if the judges looked at the bookies’ odds, and the predictions and preferences of bloggers, and shortlisted the least fancied ones. The exceptions being George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo and Ali Smith’s Autumn.

George Saunders will now be the clear favourite. Lincoln In The Bardo is a typically kooky account of the night of Abraham Lincoln’s son’s death featuring the points of view of various (ex-)people in limbo. Truly novel, and much more readable than any attempts to describe it.

I read Ali Smith’s Autumn when it came out last year, and I have to confess to remembering nothing about it. I do love Ali Smith’s writing though so I will give it another read. I might re-read Exit West as well for the same reason, although I felt the surreal (magic realist?) device of doorways from one part of the world to another weakened it’s impact. I preferred How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia.

Many column inches will be devoted to Fiona Mozley the “29-year-old” (one of the youngest people ever to be shortlisted) “bookshop worker” (she works in the Little Apple Bookshop on York) and “PhD student” (she is doing a doctorate on medieval English forests as ‘forbidden landscapes’ at the University of York). I am not surprised to see her make the shortlist. Elmet is a memorable debut with a terrific climax. On the other hand I was slightly baffled by the inclusion of Emily Fridlund’s History of Wolves on the longlist, and absolutely astonished to see it reach the shortlist. Not a bad book, but why has it been chosen ahead of so many other brilliant ones?

This may not the shortlist anyone expected, and the omission of such strong (and other-award-winning novels) make it appear weaker than it might have been, but it includes three or four authors I really love, so I am not complaining. (Sorry, did it sound like I was? I have a touch of toothache, please blame any grouchiness on that.)

I say three or four because the jury is out on one of them. The only book on the shortlist I haven’t finished yet is Paul Auster’s magnum opus 4 3 2 1. It is compelling reading, but at times so detailed that I want to yell: ‘stop trying to be Dickens!’ Effectively four books in one – or three books and a novella, if you want a spoiler – it traces four possible life-paths of one character, the same age as the author. I have been taking a break from it, five hundred pages in, so still a long way to go. If the judges (author Sarah Hall, artist Tom Phillips, travel writer Colin Thubron, literary critic Lila Azam Zanganeh and their chair: crossbench peer Baroness Lola Young) really have read it twice, and are going to read it a third time, they must really, really love it. Or they just really love reading, which is as it should be.

2017 Man Booker Prize Longlist – the strongest ever?

The longlist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize was revealed yesterday, and what an impressive list it is:

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster (US) (Faber & Faber)
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry (Ireland) (Faber & Faber)
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund (US) (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Pakistan-UK) (Hamish Hamilton)
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (Ireland) (Canongate)
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor (UK) (4th Estate)
Elmet by Fiona Mozley (UK) (JM Originals)
The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy (India) (Hamish Hamilton)
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (US) (Bloomsbury)
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (UK-Pakistan) (Bloomsbury)
Autumn by Ali Smith (UK) (Hamish Hamilton)
Swing Time by Zadie Smith (UK) (Hamish Hamilton)
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (US) (Fleet)

The judges this year are the novelist Sarah Hall, the artist Tom Phillips, the travel writer Colin Thubron, literary critic Lila Azam Zanganeh and, in the chair, Baroness Lola Young, a crossbench peer. They considered 154 novels: 144 submissions and another ten that they called in.

They will surely have a difficult job whittling it down to a shortlist of six – I can’t really complain about also-rans this year, can I? Their list pits some big-prize-winning novels against each other: the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (The Underground Railroad), the Goldsmiths Prize winner (Solar Bones), and the winner of the Walter Scott Prize and Costa Book of the Year (Days Without End).

Solar Bones consists of a single, two-hundred-page sentence, Home Fire is a contemporary reimagining of Sophocles’ Antigone and the 880-page hardback edition of Paul Auster’s 4321 weighs enough to kill a small child if it falls off a shelf. So it is a heavyweight list, and also very diverse – although Baroness Young claimed they only noticed that afterwards. A happenstance which has occurred almost every year since I began following the Booker in the early 1990’s.

The only downside to such a strong list is that there are very few surprises – except perhaps the inclusion of a novel that isn’t scheduled for publication until November (Elmet by Fiona Mozley) Did somebody move the goalposts?

The shortlist will be announced on September 13th, and the winner of the £50,000 prize on October 17th at the traditional posh bingo ‘do’ at London’s Guildhall, which will be broadcast live on the BBC. Let’s hope they don’t blow the whole budget on a male presenter.

By the way, thanks to paddyjoe for pointing out that Helen Dunmore was longlisted once (in 2010). Occasionally I do think about checking my facts properly before I post, but then Donald Trump pops up on TV to remind me that  facts don’t matter any more anyway.