The longlist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize was announced overnight in the UK. The thirteen books on the list were whittled down from over 150 submissions by a panel of five judges. Those five judges now have until 13th September to decide on a six book shortlist, before the eventual winner is announced on the 25th October.
The Man Booker Prize was first awarded in 1969, and has become recognised as the foremost prize for literary fiction written in English. Initially the award was only for writers from the UK and the Commonwealth, but in 2013 the award was expanded to include writers of any nationality in a bid to celebrate the english language “in all its vigour, its vitality, its versatility and its glory”
Here, then, are the thirteen titles longlisted for this years Man Booker Prize
- Paul Beatty – The Sellout
- J.M. Coetzee – The Schooldays of Jesus
- A.L. Kennedy – Serious Sweet
- Deborah Levy – Hot Milk
- Graeme Macrae Burnet – His Bloody Project
- Ian McGuire – The North Water
- David Means – Hystopia
- Wyl Menmuir – The Many
- Ottessa Moshfegh – Eileen
- Virginia Reeves – Work Like Any Other
- Elizabeth Strout – My Name Is Lucy Barton
- David Szalay – All That Man Is
- Madeleine Thien – Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Amongst those thirteen novels are four debut novels, whilst former double winner J.M. Coetzee has returned; Coetzee was the first author to win the prize twice, winning in 1983 for The Life & Times of Michael K and again in 1999 for Disgrace. Deborah Levy and A.L. Kennedy are no strangers to the Man Booker either, with the former shortlisted in 2012 for her novel Swimming Home. Whilst A.L. Kennedy is a former judge for the prize.
The longlist also sees a number of independent publishers in the spotlight, with five of the titles published through independent imprints, with the further titles coming from Penguin Random House imprints and from Simon & Schuster’s UK imprint Scribner.
Chair of the judging panel, Amanda Foreman, had this to say about the announcement: “This is a very exciting year. The range of books is broad and the quality extremely high.”
“From the historical to the contemporary, the satirical to the polemical, the novels in this list come from both established writers and new voices. The writing is uniformly fresh, energetic and important. It is a longlist to be relished.”
The winner of the prize will receive prize money of £50,000 ($88,000) and generally get a bump in book sales worldwide. Last year’s winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, has sold over 315,000 copies to date in the UK and Commonwealth, is now available in 20 languages and has been optioned by HBO.
For more information about the Man Booker Prize visit HERE
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