Inside the Australian and New Zealand book industry

Image. Advertisement:

Booker Prize 2021 shortlist announced

The shortlist for the 2021 Booker Prize has been announced.

The six books shortlisted for the £50,000 (A$94,300) prize are:

  • A Passage North (Anuk Arudpragasam, Granta)
  • The Promise (Damon Galgut, Chatto & Windus)
  • No One is Talking About This (Patricia Lockwood, Bloomsbury)
  • The Fortune Men (Nadifa Mohamed, Viking)
  • Bewilderment (Richard Powers, William Heinemann)
  • Great Circle (Maggie Shipstead, Doubleday).

The shortlist comprises four titles from Penguin Random House imprints and one each from Granta and Bloomsbury. Three of the shortlisted authors are from the US (Lockwood, Powers and Shipstead); Arudpragasam is Sri Lankan and Galgut is South African, while Mohamed is the first British Somali to be shortlisted for the Booker. The shortlist was chosen from a longlist of 13 announced in July.

‘With so many ambitious and intelligent books before us, the judges engaged in rich discussions not only about the qualities of any given title, but often about the purpose of fiction itself,’ said judging panel chair Maya Jasanoff. ‘We are pleased to present a shortlist that delivers as wide a range of original stories as it does voices and styles.’

The award is open to novels published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2020 and 30 September 2021. The winner will be announced on 3 November. For more information on this year’s shortlist, see the Booker website.

 

Category: International news