Two Nigerian-born authors Oyinkan Braithwaite (My Sister, the Serial Killer) and Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities) are on the long-list of authors contesting for 2019 Booker prize of £50,000.
Braithwaite, 31, who is a debutant and youngest of the writers is listed for this year’s women’s prize. Her comic thriller opens as Korede is called on to help her murderous little sister clear up yet another mess.
Judges said it was “as skillful, sharp and engaging a debut as any first novelist can produce” packed with prose “as pointed as a lethal weapon”.
The 13-book list also includes Turkish novelist Elif Shafak for 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World,which details the memories of an Istanbul sex worker whose corpse is left in a rubbish bin; Irish author Kevin Barry for Night Boat to Tangier , which judges called “a work of crime fiction not quite like any other,” and Mexican-Italian writer Valeria Luiselli nominated for her first book written in English, Lost Children Archive, which sets a family road trip from New York alongside the journey of a group of Mexican children attempting to cross the border into the US.
Margaret Atwood will be competing with another former winner: Salman Rushdie, nominated this time for Quichotte. Inspired by Don Quixote and published in August, it sees an ageing travelling salesman falling in love with a television star and driving across America to win her hand.
Judges called it a “picaresque tour de force of contemporary America, with all its alarms and craziness” On a longlist packed with big names – but notable for its exclusion of well-received novels by authors including Ian McEwan, Mark Haddon and Ali Smith – Rushdie is one of several British novelists nominated.
An Orchestra of Minorities told The Nation
Alongside him are Jeanette Winterson for Frankissstein, her reinterpretation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; John Lanchester for his dystopia The Wall; Bernadine Evaristo’sGirl, Woman, Other, a verse novel about the lives of black women; Max Porter’s Lanny, the story of a missing boy in a commuter town; and Deborah Levy’s The Man Who Saw Everything, which will be published next month and slips between time zones in what judges called “a playful and complex structure.”
After tensions in previous years over changes to the prize’s rules, widened at the end of 2013 to include US fiction, just one American novelist Lucy Ellmann is featured.
This is the sixth time the Canadian novelist has been nominated for the Booker, and her second nomination since she won the UK’s most prestigious literary prize for The Blind Assassin in 2000.
The Testaments is set 15 years after the end of her dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale.
Out on 10 September, the novel’s contents remain a closely guarded secret – with this year’s judges, chaired by Hay festival director Peter Florence, only saying in their statement: “Spoiler discretion and a ferocious non-disclosure agreement prevent any description of who, how, why and even where. So this: it’s terrifying and exhilarating.”
All 13 books are “credible winners”, according to Florence. “They imagine our world, familiar from news-cycle disaster and grievance, with wild humour, deep insight and a keen humanity,” he said. “These writers offer joy and hope. They celebrate the rich complexity of English as a global language. They are exacting, enlightening and entertaining.”The Booker long-list was chosen from 151 novels.
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