Tag: Booker Prize

And still more on Hilary M. (2)

In a timely fashion The Booker Prize webpage has a pair of additions to their Hilary Mantel section. Firstly an essay, originally published in 2012, called ‘How I came to write Wolf Hall’ extracted from the just published collection spoken of in the previous post. Well chosen, for it was for this first in the series that she won the Booker in 2009 . The last words of the piece are surely worth dying for: “What I wanted to create is a story that reflects but never repeats, a sense of history listening and talking to itself.” And, then, there is an article by her editor, Nicholas Pearson, that traces the idea of Wolf Hall to its publication, and culminating with the UK’s most prestigious literary prize. (As an aside: How I love that he read the raw manuscript on a long haul to Australia!)

International Booker

Further to my previous post, it is pleasing to note that Leïla Slimani will chair this year’s International Booker Prize, awarded to a work of translated fiction. And am just as pleased that amongst others she will be joined on the judging panel by Parul Sehgal, who I often read when she was at The New York Times and that I see now is a writer and critic at the New Yorker.

The longlist will be announced on 14th March, the shortlist of six books on 18th April and the winning title at a ceremony in London on Tuesday, 23rd May, 2023.

The long and short of it …

Of the Booker fiction prize 2022, that is. I feel like I’ve been neglectful of all the other works that made it to the last or the last but one round. So here is the so-called long list and the short listed finalists. I have read but one – Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William!

Long List announced on July 26:
Short list announced on September 6:

The winner we now know.

I should say that the Booker website is an absolute treasure trove, including reading guides for the shortlisted books, quizzes that may (or may not) help one decide on what to read (or read not), information on the judges (Neil MacGregor was Chair this year), extracts, interviews and videos. And a featured list of works from Hilary Mantel as a tribute to her place in Booker history, in British writing – of their own history but not only.

The sort-of-Booker prize

The Booker prize for fiction 2022 was announced on a special edition of Front Row on BBC Radio 4 last night (The Guardian report here) and presented by the Duchess of Dings Bums … I mean the Queen Consort … (forgive me Camilla, for you are famously a real reader!) to the Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. I neither know the author nor his work, but I am secretly – well obviously not so secretly – pleased that it was not awarded (again) to a US publication. As I have said before, the US have enough of their own gongs and the anglophile book world deserves a space beyond those shores and the reach of a few powerful media conglomerates. On the later, it is also striking that Karunatilaka’s book is published by a small UK independent press – Sort of Books.

Exploring the violent insurrections of 1980s Sri Lanka, The Guardian review from the summer suggests a work written in a magic realism tradition that blends the spiritual with the profane, sardonic humor with brutal reality, and which brings immediately Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to my mind. It is 1990 and the Maali of the title is a photographer – and he is dead. But he is a soul that has not found peace, and with now one mission: to expose the crimes of the decade gone with the evidence that he amassed during his professional (and earthly) life.

From his Front Row appearance, Karunatilaka comes across as a humourful and very interesting man indeed, and his website informs on a really spectacularly successful life – and I mean that to mean a life well-lived. And besides, he loves cricket. And, I will be reading this book.

And the winner is…

…all the books listed and fiction and lovers of the same one could say, but (with the exception of last year!) there can only be one winner of The 2020 Booker Prize, and that is Shuggie Bain, written by Douglas Stuart.

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

On the BBC Radio 4 “Front Row” page there is (for the moment at least) a video of last night’s event hosted by John Wilson, in that hybrid digital mix – in person, far away, on tape – that we have become more use to than we would like this year – nominees keeping their distance, and others likewise, and Wilson, Margaret Busby and Bernadine Evaristo at the “Round House” in Camden. But I must say all were stoical, and found a very fine tone.

Margaret Busby, reminds me that her work as a publisher over decades has been instrumental in the diversification of talent, especially Black talent, in the UK – it may be only now that she sees, we see, the fruits of her labour. Evaristo, as representative of this. And Ishiguro and Atwood, that a Booker is nice but a body of work is better. President Obama – he, presumably responsible for the rescheduling – prompts me to remember at least of one of the reasons I forgive him his shortcomings: his love of books, and belief in the power of fiction. The Duchess of Cornwall; that royal patronage is not without its virtues, and you can love horses and Charles and also words.

Forget the gripe about the transatlantic bias, what a “great looking” group it was zooming in from afar, what choice readings we heard; more than enough reasons to read their work. Given the difficulties of this year, the Booker has done a very good job, and their jury to be congratulated.

(Hilary) Mantel pieces

I recall a piece about Hilary Mantel in The Guardian the other day, which mentioned a forthcoming collection of essays; and I was immediately taken by the title: “Mantel Pieces”. This I thought very clever indeed – a nice play with name in the first instance, and then there is the association to fireplace which extends to frame and flame, warmth and light, kindle and burn, etc., and extended then to the shelf above – a piece, a place of display and decoration. Many attributes that could well apply to a fine piece of writing. And certainly to most everything put to page by Hilary Mantel.

Maybe it was that I was just a little too interested in what Mantel had to say about not making the Booker shortlist (pragmatic and gracious, of course!), or maybe it was not said; for whatever reason I failed to get that the collection does in fact comprise her contributions to the London Review of Books over thirty odd years, and this I register only now on reading this blog entry at the LRB. (A delightfully informative blog entry by the way; fulfilling the requirements as stipulated by the marketing department!) Mantel Pieces, then, is a compilation of twenty essays or reviews and, even more tantalising, each is accompanied by fragments of correspondence (for instance, with the editor Mary-Kay Wilmers) or artwork relating to the piece.

Fact-checking my own recollection: in fact, the subject matter of the collection was NOT said in the abovementioned Guardian article – only the October publication date. What it did say and I should add, is that at the moment Hilary Mantel is busily at work adapting The Mirror and the Light for the stage (alas, there is no mention yet of a continuation to the BBC television effort), and so, even if inclined to, she has little time to cry in her teacups, and obviously maintains an air of optimism in terms of a return to normality in the theatrical landscape in London.

And, diverting slightly, more generally speaking on the politics of book awards, I note the following:

  • As I predicted, there does appear again to be murmurings about the probity of opening up of the Booker to US authors (coming mostly from the conservative media in the UK granted), but Hilary Mantel is otherwise inclined and accepts the diversification argument and encourages British and Commonwealth authors to accept the challenge of greater competition. As I said: gracious. I was actually quite peeved, specifically about the Mantel omission and more generally am sceptical of conflating powerful US book market interests with good literature !
  • And then, this just read in the NYT, which is illustrative of the above said, and is some affirmation of my argument:

…another major literary event threatens to make an already overcrowded fall publishing season even more chaotic: the release of former President Barack Obama’s memoir, “A Promised Land.”

On Tuesday, the Booker Prize said it was moving its award ceremony, previously scheduled for Nov. 17, to Nov. 19 to avoid overlapping with the publication of Mr. Obama’s book…

…[this]could also fuel new criticism that the prize, originally established in 1969 to honor writers from Commonwealth countries and the Republic of Ireland, has become too Americanized and increasingly focused on the U.S. book market. American authors have dominated the Booker nominees in recent years, following a 2014 rule change that made any novel written in English and published in the U.K. eligible…

It is clear, the book business (and when all’s said and done awards are after all just another element of merchandising) operates on a global scale as with most everything else these days – for good or ill, and that is unlikely to change.

Yes, yes…I get it that the Booker people fear their winner will go under in the Barack Obama hype, it is just that I consider their argument somewhat specious – many, many people will read Obama and a lot, lot less people will read a fine contemporary novel, and some will read both, and maybe I am the latter, but they are hardly works in competition to each other. More honest would have been to admit to kowtowing to the pressure of monolithic publishing companies.

The good news is: in former President Obama, we have an ardent reader, from whom we can expect each summer one of his cult reading lists, which is sure to include National Book Award and Booker nominees and unknown gems and certainly NOT a de rigeur presidential afterlife – granted he has no reason to read a thousand pages of politicking; he lived it to write it!

A “Booker” update

Well, Hilary Mantel will not be winning a third Booker prize; the short list confirms that my laws of probability held true, and the closest to home-grown, so to speak, in the all but final call of the United Kingdoms’s premier book award is a Glasgow-born American – Douglas Stuart. But it is a diverse and interesting group, with some new names, and I do declare if very few seem to have much appetite for scandal in this ‘stranger than fiction’ year!

An interesting additive: here is a really nice piece in The New York Times, giving a glimpse of a socially-distanced, long-distance literary judging process in days of Corona. By the way, my attention momentarily turned to the accompanying screen shot of the jury at work, and the caption: “Emily Wilson, she/her, judge” – and a memo to myself to seriously investigate pronouns!

Booker 2020

Literary awards stop not for this mean, increasingly unpredictable virus making lives miserable – and to various degrees, dependent upon circumstance. Here, then, providing a modicum of distraction, the just announced longlist for The Booker Prize 2020:

The Booker Prize 2020 longlist
  • The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (Oneworld Publications)
  • This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Faber & Faber)
  • Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)
  • Who They Was by Gabriel Krauze (4th Estate, HarperCollins)
  • The Mirror & The Light by Hilary Mantel (4th Estate, HarperCollins)
  • Apeirogon by Colum McCan (Bloomsbury Publishing) 
  • The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste (Canongate Books)
  • Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing)
  • Real Life by Brandon Taylor (Originals, Daunt Books Publishing)       
  • Redhead by The Side of The Road by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus, Vintage)
  • Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Picador, Pan Macmillan)
  • Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward (Corsair, Little, Brown)
  • How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang (Virago, Little, Brown)

I can only say that I have only read Mantel; and the daunting task of writing my thoughts on her remarkable work remains on my longlist (of things to do)! And, I can only say what I’ve said before, and that is: the United States has any number of major book awards (National, Pulitzer being foremost) why on earth the Brits allowed them in the Booker a few years ago I really don’t know. Well of course one does – $$$! In my opinion, it is becoming too top heavy stateside these days – no antipodean, only one resident (I think) of the African continent, none from southern Asia, or the Caribbean. In fact there are only three listed from the UK which means, the laws of probability being such as they are, one may very well end up with a shortlist without a British writer! I hear already the screams of “Scandal!” – but what would the Booker be without controversy? Rarely has there not been a loud gripe of some sort – in or out, sponsor, judge … What was it last year? Oh, I remember – against all the “unwritten” rules, it was awarded jointly to Bernadine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood.

And I will also say that I haven’t read Anne Tyler for donkey’s years, and she was a constant companion of … let me see… the third decade of my life. Can I read Tyler again without bemoaning my lost youth?

The jury is diverse which is good, and I also note with delight that Margaret Busby leads it and Emily Wilson is another of the judges. Of the latter I need say nought (see my never ending Odyssey project!), but Busby reminds me of The Daughters of Africa, which I would like to read after all these years and then their is last year’s follow up anthology.

The Booker Prize longlist July 28th 2020