The longlist, or the “Man Booker Dozen” was announced earlier this week and I am so excited.
For those of you who may be unaware, the Man Booker is £50,000 prize to a writer from any nationality, writing in English and published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Prior to 2016, the Man Booker Prize had been open to only citizens of commonwealth countries. As such it had become a part of British literary culture. However, since 2016 it has been opened up and the last two winners have been from the United States.
This might suggest an opening up of diversity in the literary field. In fact, this year also features the first ever graphic novel to be in the running for the prize. However, there have been some criticisms this year regarding the longlist.
Contrary to the name, Man Booker Dozen, 13 books were longlisted for this year’s prize. Probably a result of the increase of submissions, a whooping 171 books, the largest submission ever in the 50 years of the prize. However, in all of those submissions, only writers from the UK, Ireland, USA and Canada were chosen. While the Man Booker official may have expanded to a global submission, it seems internally, it is still very West/Euro-centric.
The Man Booker Prize likes to consider itself as the “leading prize for quality fiction in English.” Considering just how western-centric the prize has historically been, not to mention the rather sordid legacy of colonial and imperial subjugation of the originally Commonwealth citizenship requirement of the prize, it seems to me that this self-inflation of being the ‘leading prize’ is somewhat far fetched and misleading.
Rather, and this just might be my opinion, it seems that the Prize is attempting to assert a level of literary authority that is given credence by the longevity of the Prize, but aside from that, not very much else attests to the prominence given to the Prize. In other words, I’m not convinced that a group of judges and an Advisory Committee of majority British/Euro-American/Caucasian backgrounds are the best people to state what are the leading novels of quality fiction.
Nevertheless, though I try to remain conscious about the social (and the more subtle political) impact of providing legitimacy to elitist institutions, which you cannot deny anything that suggests being of ‘quality’ must be somewhat elitist, I am always very excited about the Prize longlist announcements.
This year many of the books included all surround a similar theme. Many submissions, according to Kwame Anthony Appiah, Chair of the 2018 judges, were of a dystopian nature, some inspiring, others disturbing but all poignant. Possibly, reflective of the state of the world.
So without any more rambling, here is the (poorly-named) Man Booker Dozen:
- Snap by Belinda Bauer
- Milkman by Anna Burns
- Sabrina by Nick Drnaso
- Washington Black by Esi Edigyan
- In our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne
- Everything Under by Daisy Johnson
- The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
- The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
- Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
- The Overstory by Richard Powers
- The Long Take by Robin Robertson
- Normal People by Sally Rooney
- From A Low And Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan
I always struggle with choosing which book in the list to read first, so I figured I would present my top 3 picks to help give you an idea of where to start as well. These are the books I am most intrigued to read from the longlist:
- Snap by Belinda Bauer – Snap tells the story of Jack and his two sisters, who waited for their mum to return to their broken down car with help, but she never did. For the next three years, Jack has to take care of his sisters while convincing everyone that they are not living alone. Until quite suddenly, he finds out the truth about what happened to their mother.
- Sabrina by Nick Drnaso – The first graphic novel to be on longlisted for the Prize, Sabrina is an in-depth look at what happens when tragedy and the media collide. How somebody’s trauma becomes someone else’s gossip.
- Warlight by Michael Onjaatje – In 1945, London, still reeling from the Blitz, Nathaniel and his sister Sophie are left in the care of The Moth and his eccentric friends, who are determined to protect and educate (in their own way) the siblings. A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover the truth about that time, who those people were, why his parents apparently abandoned them and much more he did not understand as a child.
You can look forward to the shortlist of six novels being announced on September 20th, 2018 and the prize winner announced on October 16th, 2018. You can look forward to more Man Booker related posts then.
Hopefully two months will be time enough to get through a fair amount of the novels. Leave a comment below letting me know which book you’re most excited to read from the list!
Happy reading!
~S~
Image Credit: Books in the Man Booker Prize 2018 longlist. Courtesy: Man Booker Prize
