This morning, the longlist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize for Fiction was announced. The annual award of £50,000 (approximately $66,000) is given for a work of fiction originally written in English and published in the United Kingdom by a writer of any nationality.
The thirteen longlisted books are:
The Sellout (Oneworld) by Paul Beatty (U.S.); The Schooldays of Jesus (Harvill Secker) by J.M. Coetzee (South Africa, Australia); Serious Sweet (Jonathan Cape) by A.L. Kennedy (U.K.); Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton) by Deborah Levy (U.K.); His Bloody Project (Contraband) by Graeme Macrae Burnet (U.K.); The North Water (Scribner) by Ian McGuire (U.K.); Hystopia (Faber & Faber) by David Means (U.S.); The Many (Salt) by Wyl Menmuir (U.K.); Eileen (Jonathan Cape) by Ottessa Moshfegh (U.S.); Work Like Any Other (Scribner) by Virginia Reeves (U.S.); My Name Is Lucy Barton (Viking) by Elizabeth Strout (U.S.); All That Man Is (Jonathan Cape) by David Szalay (Canada, U.K.); and Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Granta Books) by Madeleine Thien (Canada).
The judges—Amanda Foreman, Jon Day, Abdulrazak Gurnah, David Harsent, and Olivia Williams—selected this year’s finalists from 155 books published between October 1, 2015, and September 30, 2016. Foreman, the 2016 chair, said of this year’s finalists, “From the historical to the contemporary, the satirical to the polemical, the novels in this list come from both established writers and new voices. The writing is uniformly fresh, energetic and important. It is a long list to be relished.” The list includes four debut novels and one former double winner, J. M. Coetzee, who received the prize in 1983 for Life & Times of Michael K, and again in 1999 for Disgrace.
The shortlist of six finalists will be announced on Tuesday, September 13, at a press conference in London. Each shortlisted author receives £2,500. The winner will be announced on Tuesday, October 25, at a ceremony in London’s Guildhall.
First awarded in 1969, the Man Booker Prize is one of the most prestigious English-language prizes for literary fiction. Previous winners include Salman Rushdie, Iris Murdoch, Hilary Mantel, and Marlon James, whose 2015 winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, has sold over 315,000 copies in the U.K. and commonwealth to date, and is translated in twenty languages.