LONDON — Booker Prize winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart are in the running again for the prestigious fiction award, alongside Dublin gangs, dystopian science fiction and the New England characters of Pulitzer Prize laureate Elizabeth Strout.
Judges read 163 novels to come up with the 13 semifinalists announced Tuesday for the 50,000 pound ($66,000) Booker Prize, a list described by historian Mary Beard, head of the judging panel, as literary “dynamite.”
The list includes James' "The Disappearers," about a group of gay men in a hostile 1980s Jamaica; Stuart's " John of John," a story of father-son secrets on a remote Scottish island; and Strout's heartfelt small-town tale "The Things We Never Say."
James won the Booker in 2015 for “A Brief History of Seven Killings” and Stuart won in 2020 for “Shuggie Bain.” Strout’s “Oh William!” was a finalist in 2022. She won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009 for “Olive Kitteridge.”
They sit alongside lesser-known names on a Booker longlist that includes authors with roots in Britain, Ireland, Jamaica, Mexico, Turkey and the United States.
Three of those on the list are debut authors: Turkish-American writer Kenan Orhan for family history story “The Renovation,” British author Rebecca Perry for Medieval-to-modern tale “May We Feed the King” and Ireland’s Djamel White for “All Them Dogs,” a thriller set in the Dublin underworld.
White, at 28, is the youngest author in the running. The oldest is 81-year-old M. John Harrison, whose postapocalyptic tale “The End of Everything” is a rare science fiction novel to make the Booker list.
The other contenders are “The Shadow of the Object” by Chloe Aridjis, “Black Bag” by Luke Kennard, “The Vivisectors” by Missouri Williams, “Switzy” by Emma Cline, “Helen of Nowhere” by Makenna Goodman and Gwendoline Riley’s “The Palm House.”
Beard said the five jurors, who include Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and American novelist Patricia Lockwood, tried to look beyond the idea of a typical Booker winner – “slightly serious, about to be classic.” Instead they chose novels that are “trying to expand the boundaries of how we can think about ourselves in completely different ways,”
“Sometimes they’re using humor, sometimes it’s pathos, sometimes there’s shock value,” Beard said. “They’re risk-takers. They are dynamite. They say ‘Come on, try seeing it a different way.’”
Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers and is open to novels from any country published in the U.K. and Ireland. Last year’s winner was “Flesh” by Hungarian-British writer David Szalay.
The judges will announce six finalists on Sept. 22, and the winner will be revealed Nov. 9 at a ceremony in London.
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