Here’s the 2021 Booker Prize longlist.
It seems like we just got done celebrating the 2020 Booker Prize winner, but it’s already that time again: the “Booker Dozen” has been announced. The 13 books longlisted for this year’s Booker, the UK’s most prestigious prize for a novel written in English, were selected from 158 novels, all published in the UK or Ireland between October 1 2020 and September 30 2021. The shortlist of six will be announced on September 14 of this year, and the winner, who will take home £50,000 in addition to massive sales and bragging rights, will be announced on November 2.
“One thing that unites these books is their power to absorb the reader in an unusual story, and to do so in an artful, distinctive voice,” said Maya Jasanoff, the chair of this year’s judging panel, in a statement.”Many of them consider how people grapple with the past — whether personal experiences of grief or dislocation or the historical legacies of enslavement, apartheid, and civil war. Many examine intimate relationships placed under stress, and through them meditate on ideas of freedom and obligation, or on what makes us human. It’s particularly resonant during the pandemic to note that all of these books have important things to say about the nature of community, from the tiny and secluded to the unmeasurable expanse of cyberspace.”
Without any further ado, here’s the longlist:
Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North (Granta Books, Granta Publications)
Rachel Cusk, Second Place (Faber)
Damon Galgut, The Promise (Chatto & Windus, Vintage, PRH)
Nathan Harris, The Sweetness of Water (Tinder Press, Headline, Hachette Book Group)
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (Faber)
Karen Jennings, An Island (Holland House Books)
Mary Lawson, A Town Called Solace (Chatto & Windus, Vintage, PRH)
Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This (Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing)
Nadifa Mohamed, The Fortune Men (Viking, Penguin General, PRH)
Richard Powers, Bewilderment (Hutchinson Heinemann, PRH)
Sunjeev Sahota, China Room (Harvill Secker, Vintage, PRH)
Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle (Doubleday, Transworld Publishers, PRH)
Francis Spufford, Light Perpetual (Faber)
Let the betting (and reading) begin!
