Literary Prizes: the Booker Prize

Summary: Here I unleash the first of my literary-related posts, in a series describing the major prizes. We begin with one of the most prestigious, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, often shortened to the Booker Prize. The prize awards, in the opinion of the judges, the best novel originally written in English in the year of the award and published in the UK. The first winner was P. H. Newby with Something to Answer For in 1969, the current winner is Paul Beatty with The Sellout, and 2017’s winner will be announced on 17 October. The winner receives £50,000, but the prize also generates tremendous publicity—and sometimes controversy.

Foundation and Sponsorship:  Man Group have sponsored the award since 2002 and hence the ‘Man’ part of the name. The prize was established by Booker McConnell Ltd (now called the Booker Group) who sponsored it from the first award in 1969 until Man Group took the reins. During this time, it was known as the Booker-McConnell Prize. Man Group decided to keep the ‘Booker’ part of the name because of its strong association with the prize. Here’s a quick overview of these two companies.
Man Group are an investment management company, managing funds worth about $95 billion and with revenue of about $800 million. The funds are hedge funds, meaning they have lower regulatory requirements than other funds but are only open to institutional or accredited investors—the likes of you and I can’t put a hundred quid in each month. The company was founded in 1783 by James Man, initially as a sugar cooperage and brokerage—a cooperage is a facility for making barrels, if, like me, you didn’t know. They trade on the London Stock Exchange, their headquarters are in London and they employ about 1,200 people worldwide. In terms of corporate responsibility, Man Group set up the Man Charitable Trust in 1978, an independent charity with trustees from across the group, which administers grants to small and medium-sized charities, focusing on literacy and numeracy programmes. Together with Oxford University, they also co-founded the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance, which pursues research into financial markets, especially machine learning and data analytics.
The Booker Group was founded in 1835 as the Booker Line, using a fleet of ships to transport goods. It ran sugar estates in the South American country of Guyana (previously called British Guiana, which was British-owned from 1814 to 1966) for much of its history and made trade runs between Guyana and Liverpool, with sugar and rum prominent among the cargo. The company controlled much of the country’s sugar industry until the sugar estates were nationalised in 1976, although Guyana invited them back in the ’90s. The company diversified into several areas, with UK wholesale food sales via cash and carry warehouses prominent. They also created an Authors division to purchase the copyrights of famous authors, amongst them Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie, taking advantage of favourable tax rules (also called loopholes) to the benefit of both authors and themselves. It was supposedly Ian Fleming who suggested the idea of a literary prize over a game of golf. In later years, Booker was purchased by Iceland Supermarkets in 2000, then by the Icelandic company Baugur in 2005 (who were implicated in the Icelandic financial crisis of 2008), then split off and merged with Bluehealth Holdings plc to create the current company the Booker Group plc. It’s now the leading food wholesaler in the UK, supplying stores, pubs and restaurants from about 170 warehouses; owns the Budgen and Londis stores; has operations in India; is listed on the London Stock Exchange; has an annual revenue of about £5 billion and employs around 13,000. To bring us up to date, Tesco announced they’d reached agreement to buy Booker Group plc in January 2017, and the proposed deal is undergoing investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority.

Rules and Administration: The Booker awards, in the opinion of the judges, the best novel originally written in English in the year of the award and published in the UK by “an imprint formally established in the UK”. An imprint is a trade name that a publisher publishes under (they may have several for different markets). The novel can’t be a translation, must be a full-length novel and the author can be any nationality. Here’s a few more details, mixed with the odd aside:

• The actual rules are a bit longer, although refreshingly only two pages. I know you want them, so check out the 2017-rules. One point to highlight is that the original publishing date must be between 1 October of the previous year and 30 September of the current year (this is what “the year of the award” means).
• Until 2014 there were nationality requirements for the award and only Commonwealth, Irish and Zimbabwean authors were eligible. In previous years South Africans were stated as eligible, but once South Africa rejoined the Commonwealth they were covered by the Commonwealth eligibility, so there was no need to mention them separately. Zimbabwe left the Commonwealth in 2003 after being suspended in 2002 for human rights violations, but their authors remained eligible.
• A quick aside on South Africa and Commonwealth membership. They left in 1961 after the country had voted to become a republic with 52% in favour (only whites could vote). The rules of the Commonwealth at the time (and until 2007) stated that any countries becoming republics ceased to be members until they obtained the permission of other members to remain in the organisation. For example, India received this permission in 1950, but it became clear South Africa’s application would not be supported. This is a strangely technical reason for being forced out, since the real reason was opposition to their apartheid policies. They rejoined in 1994 after Nelson Mandela became President. Two South Africa authors won the prize during their absence from the Commonwealth, both known for anti-apartheid stances—Nadime Gordimer in 1974 and J. M. Coetzee in 1983.
• The prize has been awarded every year from 1969, but two awards were (eventually) given in 1970. Here’s the reason: In the first two years, 1969 and 1970, the award was for books published the previous year, that is 1968 and 1969. In 1971, this changed to be for books published in the year of the prize, that is 1971. So it wasn’t possible for a book published in 1970 to win the prize. Forty years later this was rectified by the award of the “Lost Man Booker”, which was decided by a public vote from six shortlisted books. It was won by J. G. Farrell for the novel Troubles. He was dead, but since he’d won the award in 1973, maybe he wouldn’t be too disappointed.
• The award has been administered by the Booker Prize Foundation since 2002, an independent charity sponsored by Man Group. The Foundation also promotes literacy, for example in Universities (providing copies of shortlisted Booker novels), for the visually impaired (funding braille, giant print and talking versions of the shortlist) and, with the National Literacy Trust, in community and prison programs.
• An Advisory Committee to the Booker Prize Foundation, made up of 15 members from different aspects of the book world, advises on rule changes and the selection of the judges.
• Each year there’s a hand-picked panel of five judges, one of them assigned as chair. A few people have performed the duty twice. The judges are selected from critics, writers, academics and public figures. From 1972-’76 only three judges were selected (except 1975 when there were four).
• Publishers enter eligible books for the prize using an entry form. To try and limit the numbers, publishers are limited to only one entry (unless they previously had books selected). Typically, the number of entries are around 150: there were 156 for 2015, 155 for 2016 and 144 for 2017. This is the killer for the judges, as they’re meant to read all these novels and let’s face it, some of them must be pretty bad.
• The judges whittle the entries down to a longlist of 12 or 13 (called the Man Booker Dozen), although prior to 2007 this list could be longer. The longlist has only existed since 2001—previously the entered books were reduced straight to a shortlist.
• The longlist is then reduced to the shortlist of six books. In the past, the shortlist had anywhere from seven to only two books on the shortlist, but it’s been six since 1996.
• The dates for the 2017 prize are: deadline for entries is 10 March, longlist announced 26 July, shortlist announced 13 September, winner announced 17 October. The longlist for 2017 is already published and there are 13 books which you can see at 2017-booker-longlist. I’ve double-checked and Culture Man is, inexplicably, not there.
• The prize money started at £5,000, and currently stands at £50,000 for the winner and an additional £2,500 for each shortlisted author (so the winner gets £52,500).

The Books: The question you’re asking is when am I going to get to the books and the winners? Here we are, with a selection of expertly chosen facts.

• For the list of winners see Wikipedia-booker and scroll down to find a simple table with winners and nationalities. If you need more, Wikipedia-booker-details gives the shortlist and judges for each year. The official site is themanbookerprize.com, where you can find all kinds of booker-related news and history, including interviews with the current longlisted authors.
• There have twice been joint winners, in 1974 and 1992, but this won’t happen again as the rules now mandate that one book must win. In 1974 the winners were Nadime Gordimer’s The Conservationist and Stanley Middleton’s Holiday. Nadime Gordimer (South Africa) died in 2014 at 90, was active in the anti-apartheid movement (with some of her books banned) and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. Stanley Middleton (England) died in 2009 at 89; in 2006, The Times submitted the opening chapter of Holiday to 20 agents and publishers and all but one rejected it—the novel does “take place entirely within the mind of Edwin Fisher” (a lecturer on holiday), but full credit he did write 45 novels and it was later found out he refused an OBE in 1979 because he “didn’t feel he should be honoured for doing his job”.  In 1992 the winners were Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (made into an Oscar-winning film in 1996) and Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger. Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, novelist and editor. Barry Unsworth (England) died in 2012 at 81 (on the same day as the sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury, best known for Fahrenheit 451), and was shortlisted for the Booker three times.
• The winning novels that I’ve read are: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) and Amsterdam by Ian McEwan (1998). That’s not very good is it, although I’ve read a few more shortlisted works which restores some credibility.
• Three authors have won the prize twice: J. M. Coetzee (South Africa) with The Life and Times of Michael K in 1983 and Disgrace in 1999; Peter Carey (Australia) with Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001; and Hilary Mantel (England) with Wolf Hall in 2009 and Bring Up the Bodies in 2012. In addition, J.G. Farrell (Liverpool-born of Irish descent) won in 1973 with The Siege of Krishnapur, and had also won the “Lost Man Booker” for his 1970 novel, Troubles—these two books were the first two books of the Empire Trilogy about Britain’s declining colonial power, culminating in The Singapore Grip in 1978. He died in 1979, at the age of 44, swept to sea while angling on rocks in Bantry Bay, Northern Ireland. For an eyewitness account of his death, and commentary on his situation at the time, see a 2010 article in The Times—JGFarrell-eyewitness-account.
• There was some controversy in 1979 when Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach was shortlisted because he described the 166-page work as a novella, whereas the prize is for a full-length novel—but the wording states “a unified and substantial work” and the judges agreed that the work qualified. It didn’t win. The shortest winning book is the 132-page Offshore by Penelope Lively in 1979.
• Thomas Keneally, an Australian novelist, won in 1982 with Schindler’s Ark, which Steven Spielberg made into the Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List in 1993. The story is about Oskar Schindler (1908-1974), a Nazi Party member who saved the lives of 1,200 Jews in the second world war by employing them in his factories, having to repeatedly bribe Nazi officials to prevent their deportation and execution in the concentration camps. It’s an astonishing story, and the film, with Liam Neeson playing Oskar, was very successful, winning seven Oscars (including Best Picture), seven BAFTAs and three Golden Globes. Oskar Schindler was recognised by the Israeli government and is the only former Nazi Party member to be buried on Mount Zion in Jerusalem.
• Other winning novels to be made into successful films include: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989), which starred Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in the 1993 film; Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992), starring Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas in 1996; and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2002), directed by Ang Lee and filmed in 2012. The Remains of the Day (which I can vouch is excellent, both in film and book) was nominated for eight Oscars but won none—the reason for this is because it was competing against Schindler’s List in that year. The English Patient won nine Oscars including Best Picture, and Life of Pi won four Oscars (though not Best Picture). There have been several other film adaptations, including shortlisted novels such as Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Schindler’s List and The English Patient are the only Booker-winning books whose film adaptations have won Best Picture at the Oscars.
• As well as film adaptations, some winning novels have been made into TV series: Wolf Hall was a BBC six-part series in 2015, based on both of Hilary Mantel’s winning novels (Wolf Hall (2009) and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012)); Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013) is being adapted for a BBC six-part series (to be filmed in New Zealand); Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004) was a three-part BBC series in 2006.
• A thought for Beryl Bainbridge, who died in 2010 aged 77, and made the Booker Prize shortlist five times (1973, ’74, ’89, ’96, ’98), never to win. The Booker Foundation created a special Best of Beryl Prize as a tribute in 2011, and asked the public to vote which of her novels most deserved the award. Master Georgie (her final nominated book from 1998) won; it was about the British experience of the Crimean War told through the adventures of a surgeon George Hardy, who volunteers to work on the battlefields.
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, the 1981 winner, was awarded The Best of Booker Prize in 2008, to celebrate the prize’s 40th anniversary. A panel of judges selected a shortlist of six and the winner was determined by an online public vote. The prize received some criticism since the public could only choose from six selected books and some favourites were left out—for example, an Evening Standard selection in 2016 had The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989), The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje, 1992) and The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood, 2000) as the top three, none of which made the Best of Booker shortlist. However, let’s not be churlish—from the description the book is highly inventive and intelligent with serious political and historic points, and Midnight’s Children also won a similar Booker of Bookers’ award in 1993 (for the 25th anniversary) which was chosen by three former booker chairs. The book’s genre is ‘magical realism’, and it’s ‘a loose allegory for events in India both before and after the independence and partition of India’. The story is narrated by Saleem Sinai, born with telepathic powers at midnight of 15 August 1947, the moment when India became an independent country. The Midnight’s Children of the title are 1,000 other children born between midnight and 01:00am on that date, who also have special powers. He calls a conference of these children and events in the book mirror the course of modern Indian history. For the record, both the independence of India and its partition into India and Pakistan took effect on 15 August 1947 through a British Act of Parliament—the aftermath resulted in tragedy, with a refugee crisis and many deaths, estimated in the hundreds of thousands, if not more.
• Here are a few other Booker Prize winners that are particularly famous, though I write this with imperfect knowledge and apologies to those I’ve ignored: The Sea, the sea (1978)  by Iris Murdoch (British, Irish-born); Rites of Passage (1980) by William Golding (England); The Old Devils (1986) by Kingsley Amis (England); Possession by A. S. Byatt (England); Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) by Roddy Doyle (Ireland); The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy (India);  and The Sense of an Ending (2011) by Julian Barnes. Kingsley Amis was considered past his best by the time of his 1986 award, with possibly his first novel, Lucky Jim, his greatest (I have read that and it’s terrific). I’ve seen The Old Devils described as both a return to form and as dated, so I’ll leave the question of its quality inconclusively hanging—but I will note that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which it beat, has lasted and is considered a classic. Martin Amis, Kingsley’s son, has been shortlisted once (Time’s Arrow, 1991) and longlisted once, and is also often mentioned amongst authors overlooked for the prize. To divert slightly, the only other family members to achieve shortlisted books are Anita Desai (India) who’s been shortlisted three times (1980, 1984 and 1999), and her daughter, Kiran Desai (India), the winner in 2006 with The Inheritance of Loss.
• Here are the latest winners:

2011: Julian Barnes (England) The Sense of an Ending
2012: Hilary Mantel (England) Bring Up the Bodies
2013: Eleanor Catton (New Zealand) The Luminaries
2014: Richard Flanagan (Australia) The Narrow Road to the Deep North
2015: Marlon James (Jamaica) A Brief History of Seven Killings
2016: Paul Beatty (US) The Sellout

The Man Booker International Prize: The Man Booker International Prize (for fiction translated into English) is awarded for a book written in another language than English and translated and published in the UK by a UK imprint. The process and rules are pretty much the same as for the Booker Prize, with a chosen panel of five judges selecting a longlist of 12 or 13, then a shortlist of six, followed by the prize announcement. The prize is £50,000, split equally between author and translator, with an extra £2,000 for each shortlisted book (also equally split). The book must have been published between 1 May of the previous year and 30 April of the current year. The award was originally, from its foundation in 2005 to 2015, given every two years to a living author for a body of work published in English or available in English translation. This could include Commonwealth authors eligible for the main Booker Prize and was not awarded against a single work. It was won by an Albanian, a Nigerian, a Canadian, a Hungarian and two Americans. From 2016, the Booker International Prize merged with (or took over) the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the format changed to mirror the Booker format. The Independent prize had been for translated fiction published in the UK, and was founded by The Independent newspaper in 1990 and later run by BookTrust, a British literary charity. You can find the Booker International Prize winners and details at Booker-International, but since there’s only been two winning books so far, I’ll give you the details: the 2016 winner was The Vegetarian by Han Seng (South Korea), translated by Deborah Smith; and for 2017 was A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman (Israel), translated by Jessica Cohen. The 2017 winner was announced at a ceremony at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on 14 June, and the longlist for 2018 will be disclosed next March.

Readability and Politics: Any prize based on judgement will invite debate and controversy. In contrast, sporting contests are usually more clear-cut since it is obvious who wins, although they have their own controversies (think offside goals, gamesmanship and banned substances). For the Booker, the award is for the best eligible novel, in the opinion of the judges. That invites questions such as how representative or unbiased are the judges, and do they come from a restricted group of people which encourages groupthink or only considers certain types of books. You could have a more metric-based prize by awarding it on a public poll or by sales figures, but that might lead to the bigger publishers and authors tying up the prize by spending more money. So anyway, we have the Booker judges, they’re industry experts, they do a lot of work to read 150-odd books, they’ve chosen some great books over the years, and they generate entertainment and column-inches galore. It can’t be that bad a system! Here are some of the talking points:

• The prize has been accused of both rewarding unreadable books and of dumbing down. This came to an entertaining head in 2011 when Dame Stella Rimington (former Director General of MI5) acted as the chair of judges and said the panel were looking for readable books, which was backed up by her fellow judge Chris Mullen (an author and ex-Labour MP) who said the winning novel had to “zip along”. A number of literary commentators and figures attacked this sentiment, essentially calling the 2011 shortlist too readable and complaining about books that missed out (notably Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child). Andrew Motion, the former poet laureate, said the focus on readability “opens up a completely false divide between what is high end and what is readable”, and gave his own shortlist. I saw an off-the-record quote in the Guardian from an unnamed publisher saying “Basically, the whole thing needs to be an utter snobfest, otherwise how is it different from the Costas?”; a commentary from Lucy Scholes in The Daily Beast (a US news site) that said the (shortlisted) A. D. Miller’s Snowdrops “teeters dangerously on the edge of genre fiction”; and a comment from Jonathan Ruppin of the bookseller Foyles “we’d hate to see the Man Booker prioritise entertainment over literary merit”. There’s lots more along these lines, balanced by criticism of some ‘unreadable’ winners, and the ‘readability versus high-end quality’ debate is perennial, unresolved and part of the fun. In fact, after their announcement, the 2011 list broke the sales record for shortlisted books, selling more than double the previous record from 2009. At the 2011 awards ceremony, Stella Rimington hit back with “we’ve seen black propaganda, de-stabilisation operations…worthy of the KGB at its height”. The chair of the 2012 judges, Sir Peter Stothard, editor of The Times Literary Supplement, rowed back towards a more academic approach, saying “I’m afraid…a lot of what counts for criticism these days is…how many stars did it get? Did I have a good time? Would my children like it? It is opinion masquerading as literary criticism.”
• The Scottish novelist Alison (A. L.) Kennedy, one of the judges in 1996, said (in 2001, and off-the-record, but it got widely quoted) that the prize was determined by “who knows who, who’s sleeping with who, who’s selling drugs to who, who’s married to who, whose turn it is”.  She also said of the longlist “I read the 300 novels and no other bastard did [on the judging panel]”; though in fairness, 300 exaggerates the number of books! There doesn’t seem to be any evidence or real accusations of corruption, but perhaps a subtler network effect. Jason Cowley, a judge in 2007, said “Each of the judges has his or her prejudices. Some judges, especially those inside literary London, have a network of contacts and friendships which may lead them to act in ways that they don’t quite understand. Certain judges tend to protect certain writers and they are skilful about manipulating positions.” John Sutherland, an English professor and judge in 1999 said “There is a well-established London literary community. Rushdie doesn’t get shortlisted now because he has attacked that community.” Again, you can find more in this vein, including from Irvine Welsh, whose Trainspotting was pulled from the shortlist in 1993 when two judges threatened to walk out—he stated, “The Booker prize’s contention to be an inclusive, non-discriminatory award could be demolished by anybody with even a rudimentary grasp of sixth-form sociology.”
• John Berger, the winner in 1972 with G. and known for his Marxist worldview, protested during his acceptance speech against Booker McConnell, blaming Booker’s 130 years of sugar production in the Caribbean for the region’s modern poverty and donating half his prize to the British Black Panthers.
• The decision to open the prize to all nationalities attracted criticism, with fears that the prize would lose a distinctive (Commonwealth) character and would be dominated by American authors. There is some evidence of the latter, with two US authors on the shortlist in 2014, 2015 and 2016, and Paul Beatty becoming the first American winner in 2016. Four US authors also sit on the 2017 longlist and one of them is the favourite. I think the Booker Foundation have been smart here, trying to remain or become (depending on point of view) the prominent literary prize—it now serves as a global prize for both an English and a translated novel, there aren’t multiple categories as with many literary awards, the rules are simple and the prize is backed by powerful history and publicity.

My quick opinion: The Booker Prize is a story of itself, which is a good thing for literature. It has a history and the winner is likely to be a ‘literary’ novel. ‘Genre’ books (crime thrillers, fantasy, romances, etc.) are unlikely to win, although literary books with elements of those genres do. Some of the winners and nominated books are superb and readable, some are superb but require work, and some are undoubtedly poor or unreadable or both. There will be books that should have won and didn’t and books that won and shouldn’t have—you can find opinions on this across the Internet. It’s all part of the story! I suspect the Booker will sometimes lean one way and sometimes another between ‘readable’ and ‘challenging’, and will self-correct when it strays too far. Note that the Costa Book Awards (started in 1971 as the Whitbread Book Awards) for British- and Irish-based authors are intended to award literary merit but are also deliberately more populist with the remit to choose “well-written, enjoyable books that they would strongly recommend anyone to read”—there is occasionally overlap with the Bookers, for example, Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies winning both in 2012. On the corruption side, I’m sure there’s a literary set with an element of shared viewpoint, but it all adds to the intrigue, and I don’t think the Booker has ever been accused of real corruption. For the proper thing, you can perhaps look at a prize such as the Prix Goncourt, France’s premier literary prize. Jon Henley, in an article in the Guardian in 2005, reported that SCPA, a department of the French justice ministry, attacked French literary awards in general in a 2004 report—effectively saying that jury members, who are generally writers and often recruited for life in a secretive way, were indistinguishable from the publishers they wrote for, creating a clear conflict of interest. The Guardian article went on to say that the Prix Goncourt (established in 1903 and worth millions in sales to the winner) and other French literary prizes have long been accused of rigging their votes, taking it in turns to reward big publishers. [Legal disclaimer: please don’t sue me.]

The Media: The Booker Prize is covered worldwide by TV, radio and press media, and results in international recognition and a large increase in sales for the winner. Having said that, the popularity and public profile has varied over the years and not all winners stand the test of time. Right now, it seems the organisers know what they’re doing, and the prize is established as amongst the most prominent in world literature, helped by the decision to open the award to all nationalities. The main global rivals seem to be the Nobel prize (which is for a body of work and not a single novel) and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (restricted to Americans). A communications agency, Four Communications, handles the PR for the Booker Prize and undertakes activities such as improving social media presence, managing the relationship with the BBC, and increasing the reach of the prize, including a big push in the US. The awards ceremony has been held at London’s Guildhall since 2005 and the BBC News Channel have covered it live for the past few years.

Controversies and heavyweight authors help publicity and an example comes from 1980 with the ‘literary battle’ between two famous writers, William Golding (Rites of Passage) and Anthony Burgess (Earthly Powers), making front-page news. Both were favourites and Burgess refused to attend the ceremony unless he was confirmed in advance as the winner (which he wasn’t). Golding won the prize with the judges making the decision thirty minutes before the ceremony.

I’ll also give a mention to the Not the Booker prize, a spoof award run for the last few years by the Guardian columnist Sam Jordison. Readers are asked to nominate books to form a longlist, then to send reviews of over one hundred words to select the shortlist (the words aren’t counted, but reviewers are asked to make it look like they care), and then a panel of judges chosen from his readers select the winner. Although non-serious, the eligibility is the same as the Booker and it does look like it tries to find good literature, and indeed see if the winner is the same as the Booker itself (it never is). Last year’s winner was The Summer That Melted Everything by Tiffany McDaniel, rewarded by a Guardian mug.

Latest Booker news: The 2017 shortlist is eagerly awaited on 13 September, and the winner will be announced on 17 October. The favourite is Colson Whitehead (US) with The Underground Railway, an alternative history novel about two slaves in the US who try and escape using the Underground Railway—this is an actual railway system in the novel, but in reality was a series of safe houses and routes. It’s already won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke award (a British sci-fi award), and several others, which almost seems unfair on the rest! The longlist also contains Arundhati Roy’s second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (her first was the Booker-winning The God of Small Things), and fiction from four previous shortlisted authors—Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Sebastien Barry and Mohsin Hamid. Also on the list is Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones, a single-sentence novel of 270-odd pages. This sounds bad, but a lot of reviewers say they expected a pretentious book and it turned out terrific. The book is about an engineer looking back over his life and is written as a stream of consciousness, given structure and made readable by line breaks. I’ll finally mention History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund because I like the title, but this is last in the betting odds. However, the judges are a law unto themselves, so let’s see.

Final word: I offer a humble recommendation that you pick a previous winner or something on the current longlist and give it a go. You can check reviews, or the Look Inside (or equivalent) feature on Amazon or other online sellers to read the first chapter and make sure it draws you in. To follow my own advice, I’ve just ordered Schindler’s Ark.