LONDON – Elizabeth Strout, Karen Joy Fowler and Leila Mottley are among six American authors nominated for this year’s Booker Prize, announced their nominations in a press release Tuesday.
Strout, the most popular author on the list of 13 Strong People, is nominated for “Oh William!“A novel about a grieving woman helping her ex-husband investigate his family past; Karen Joy Fowler, for “Booth,” a fictional family portrait surrounding Abraham Lincoln assassin, John Wilkes Booth; and Leila MottleyBecause “Nightcrawling“A bestseller about a desperate Black teenager in California who ends up falling for a sex trafficking ring.
The other American nominated is Hernan Diaz for “Trust“Selby Wynn Schwartz for “After Sappho” and Percival Everett for”The trees. “
The Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards, is awarded annually to the author of a novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. It is famous for elevating literary careers and creating new stars, with recent winners including Margaret Atwood, Bernardine Evaristo and Douglas Stuart.
Until 2014, the award was open only to British and Irish authors, but since that year, when it has expanded to include authors of any nationality, Britain’s literary establishment has regularly struggled struggling with the dominance of American authors on the Booker list. Tuesday’s announcement is likely to rekindle those concerns, although the nominees also include three British and two Irish authors, as well as NoViolet Bulawayo, from Zimbabwe, and Shehan Karunatilaka, of Sri Lanka. .
British writers on the list include 87-year-old Alan Garner, who Booker says is the oldest nominee ever, and who rose to fame in the UK as the a pioneering author of children’s fantasy novels in the 1960s and 1970s.
The nominated novels varied in subject matter. Bulawayo is nominated for “glory, ” An allegory of animals after the fall of the dictatorship; Maddie Mortimer was nominated for “The Map of Our Spectacular Bodies,” a novel whose narrators include both the dying mother and the cancer that is killing her.
Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum and chair of this year’s jury, highlighted that diversity in a bulletin announcing the nominees, saying the books include “story, story allegory and allegory, fantasy, meditation and horror”. However, he said, two main themes are clear: “how individual lives are shaped and defined by long historical processes” and “the elusive nature of truth”.
“The extent to which we can trust words, spoken or written, in many of these books is the real subject,” says MacGregor.
The Booker jury, which also includes critic Shahidha Bari and novelist Alain Mabanckou, will now re-read all of the nominated books before placing the selection on a six-name shortlist, it is expected. will be announced on September 6. The winning novel, whose author will receive a prize of £50,000, or about $60,000, will be announced on October 17 at a ceremony in London. .
The full long list is:
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Hernan Diaz, “Trust“
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Percival Everett,”The trees“
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Karen Joy Fowler,”Booth“
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Alan Garner, “Treacle Walker”
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Shehan Karunatilaka, “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”
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Claire Keegan,”Little things like this“
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Graeme Macrae Burnet, “Case Study”
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Audrey Magee,”Colony“
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Maddie Mortimer, “The Map of Our Spectacular Bodies”
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Selby Wynn Schwartz, “After Sappho”
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Elizabeth Strout,”Oh William!“
