The stories deal with family, relationships and personal struggles against a panoply of backgrounds: war, climate change, racism, homophobia, poverty, alcoholism, neglect, national breakdown.
Such is the variety of reading on offer among the books shortlisted for this year”s Booker Prize, whose winner is due to be announced on Thursday evening (from 2000 CET).
The six books — from four female and two male authors — were shortlisted in April for the prize, awarded each year for the best original English-language novel published in the United Kingdom or Ireland.
The traditional black-tie dinner in London has been scrapped because of the pandemic. The significance of this year’s award is underlined in a message from the Booker Prize Foundation’s Literary Director, Gaby Wood.
“We can’t go to an art gallery or to the theatre. We can’t hear live music or sit in a cinema. We can’t congregate, for any reason, for a while,” she writes. “One thing we can still do is read.”
The books on the shortlist are:
Dangarembga, one of Zimbabwe’s most garlanded authors, was arrested in July and spent a night in detention for taking part in anti-corruption protests.
The six finalists include four debut novelists: Doshi, Cook, Stuart and Taylor. The list omits high-profile books including “The Mirror and the Light,” the conclusion of Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed Tudor trilogy. Mantel won the Booker for both its predecessors, “Wolf Hall” and “Bring up the Bodies” and had been widely tipped for the hat trick.
The winner of the Booker Prize will receive £50,000 (€55,800), while each finalist takes home £2,500 (€2,790). The result will be announced online and on radio from the UK capital’s Roundhouse venue, with virtual appearances from Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, and former US President Barack Obama.
Obama’s new memoir, “A Promised Land,” was published this week and sold almost 890,000 copies in the US and Canada in its first 24 hours.
Last year’s prize was won jointly by Canada’s Margaret Atwood for “The Testaments” and Britain’s Bernardine Evaristo for “Girl, Woman, Other”.
The 2020 International Booker Prize — awarded for a book translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland — went to Dutch poet and writer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld for her novel “The Discomfort of Evening”.
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