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Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro and Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers are among 13 authors short of the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction.
Briton Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017, is on the shortlist announced Tuesday for the 50,000 pound ($ 69,000) prize with “Klara and the Sun”, a novel about love and humanity narrated by a solar powered android. This is Booker’s fourth nomination for Ishiguro, who won the award in 1989 for “Leftovers of the Day”.
American author Powers is nominated for “Bewilderment”, about an astrobiologist and his neurodivergent son. Powers won the Pulitzer of Fiction in 2019 for the eco-epic “The Overstory”, which was also a finalist for the Booker Prize.
We are delighted to announce the # 2021Booker Award long list! Watch Judge President Maya Jasanoff present the 13 selected books with her fellow judges @horatiaharrod, @nataschaandsons, Chigozie Obioma and Rowan Williams, and find out more here: https://t.co/RycZCKh2YZ#FinestFiction pic.twitter.com/C3HkXgc5i2
– The Booker Prizes (@TheBookerPrizes) July 26, 2021
Other previous Booker contenders on this year’s list include South African Damon Galgut for his history of racism and calculation, “The Promise”; British writer Sunjeev Sahota for “China Room”, which travels between England and India; and Canadian Mary Lawson for her story of life in a northern town, “A Town Called Solace”.
Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize has a reputation for transforming the careers of writers and was originally open to British, Irish and Commonwealth writers. Eligibility was extended in 2014 to all English-language novels published in the UK
Two first American novels are among this year’s nominees: Patricia Lockwood’s saturated social media story “No One is Talking About This” and Nathan Harris’ bestseller “The Sweetness of Water,” which is set in the southern United States at the end of the War.
The list also includes “Great Circle” by American writer Maggie Shipstead, “Light Perpetual” by British novelist Francis Spufford, “The Fortune Men” by British / Somali author Nadifa Mohamed, “Second Place” by British writer / Canadian Rachel Cusk, South African novelist Karen “An Island” and Jennings’ “A Passage North” by Sri Lankan writer Anuk Arudpragasam.
Historian Maya Jasanoff, who chairs this year’s jury, said many novels “examine how people grapple with the past – whether it’s personal experiences of grief or dislocation or the historical legacy of slavery, apartheid and civil war ”.
“Many examine intimate relationships under stress and, through them, meditate on ideas of freedom and obligation, or what makes us human,” she said. “It is particularly resonant during the pandemic to note that all of these books have important things to say about the nature of the community, from the smallest and most isolated to the immeasurable expanse of cyberspace.”
A shortlist of six books will be announced on September 14 and the winner will be crowned on November 3 at a ceremony in London.
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