The Man Booker Prize announced its 2017 shortlist of six novels on September 13. Big names such as Arundhati Roy, who won the Prize in 1997 for her debut book The God of Small Things, and American author Colson Whitehead, whose nominated book The Underground Railroad won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, did not make the cut.
The six books selected from the longlist of 13 are:
4321 by Paul Auster (US) (Faber & Faber)
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund (US) (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (UK-Pakistan) (Hamish Hamilton)
Elmet by Fiona Mozley (UK) (JM Originals)
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (US) (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Autumn by Ali Smith (UK) (Hamish Hamilton)
The shortlist this year includes two debuts – Elmet by Fiona Mozley, who at 29 also happens to the youngest writer on the shortlist, and Emily Fridlund for History of Wolves. Mohsin Hamid has made it to the shortlist a second time with Exit West, and Ali Smith for the fourth time with her novel about Time, love and ageing – Autumn.
4321 by Paul Auster, 70, happens to be the longest novel on the list at 866 pages. Lincoln in the Bardo is short story writer George Saunders’s first full-length novel.
{{/usCountry}}4321 by Paul Auster, 70, happens to be the longest novel on the list at 866 pages. Lincoln in the Bardo is short story writer George Saunders’s first full-length novel.
{{/usCountry}}The winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize will be announced on October 17 in London.
Baroness Lola Young, Chair of judges for 2017, while making the announcement, said, “The emotional, cultural, political and intellectual range of these books is remarkable, and the ways in which they challenge our thinking is a testament to the power of literature.”