A-listers back in reckoning

Two former winners have made it yet again to this year's shortlist for the Booker Prize. Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie are among the authors competing for the prestigious award.

The six shortlisted authors — four women and two men — were announced recently by Peter Florence, Chair of Judges. 

According to Florence, “The common thread is our admiration for the extraordinary ambition of each of these books. There is an abundance of humour, of political and cultural engagement, of stylistic daring and astonishing beauty of language. Like all great literature, these books teem with life, with a profound and celebratory humanity. Anyone who reads these  six books would be enriched and awe-struck by the power of story, and encouraged by what literature can do to set our imaginations free.”

The list was chosen from 151 novels by a panel of five judges. The 2019 Booker Prize for fiction is open to writers of any nationality, writing in English and published in the UK or Ireland between October 1, 2018 and September 30, 2019.

The shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The 2019 winner will be announced on October 14 at an awards ceremony at London's Guildhall.

For 2019, the judges' panel is chaired by Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival, and consists of former fiction publisher and editor Liz Calder; novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo; writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch; and pianist and composer Joanna MacGregor.

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has made it twice to this list as has India born Rushdie. Atwood bagged the award in 2000 for Blind Assassins. Her 2019 nominated work, The Testaments is a sequel to her acclaimed book, The Handmaid's Tale.

This long-awaited follow-up has been shortlisted before it has even been published. The Testaments, which returns to the dystopian world of Gilead, will be released on Tuesday. The fictional world of Gilead has gained popularity through hit dystopian drama series, The Handmaid's Tale starring Elisabeth Moss.

The Testaments takes place 15 years after the events of the first novel (published in 1985). It is set in a totalitarian society which enslaves fertile women.

Apart from Atwood, another heavyweight is Rushdie, who won the Booker for Midnight’s Children in 1981. The novel not only won the 1981 Booker, but also the special 1993 Booker of Bookers prize, which commemorated the award's 25th anniversary.

Turkish Elif Shafak, Nigerian Chigozie Obioma, Londoner Bernadine Evaristo and Lucy Ellman make rest of the list. Ellman’s Ducks, Newbury Port, is a massive 998 page-long stream of consciousness. While Atwood and Rushdie may not need a Booker to be best-selling authors but it doesn't hurt either to rake up the numbers. However, for lesser-known authors, a Booker win can transform their careers.

Booker winner Anna Burns' novel Milkman sold 963 copies a week before the prize. This number shot up to 9,446 the week after. Milkman, based on troubled life in the Northern Ireland, has sold more than 500,000 copies till now and been translated into 40 languages.

The prize rules were changed in 2013 to open it up to writers beyond the Commonwealth, provided they wrote in English and published in the UK. 

JCB Prize for Literature 2019 (longlist)

The longlist for the 2019 JCB Prize for Literature was announced this Wednesday. The 10 selected entries are a mix of established authors and debutants. 

Four women and six men writers will vie for the prize money of Rs 25 lakh, and with an additional Rs 10 lakh for the translator in case the winning book is a translation. The shortlist will be announced on October 4. The winner will be announced on November 2, 2019.

• Ib’s Endless Search for Satisfaction by Roshan Ali, Penguin.
• There’s Gunpowder in the Air by Manoranjan Byapari, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha, Westland.
• The City and the Sea by Rajkamal Jha, Penguin.
• Milk Teeth by Amrita Mahale, Westland.
• The Queen of Jasmine Country by Sharanya Manivannan, HarperCollins.
• Trial by Silence; Lonely Harvest (treated as one novel) by Perumal Murugan, translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, Penguin.
• A Patchwork Family by Mukta Sathe, Speaking Tiger.
• My Father’s Garden by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, Speaking Tiger.
• The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, HarperCollins.
• A Secret History of Compassion, by Paul Zacharia, Westland.

— Agencies