Overview: Man Booker Prize longlist 2014

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Announced on the 23rd of this month (last Wednesday), what puzzles most about this year’s Booker Prize longlist (made public since 2001) featuring 13 nominated titles is the complete absence of African writers from the (very male, very white) list.

In September last year it was announced that the Booker Prize would be open to American writers for the first time, making a change from previous years when authors from the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth and Zimbabwe could be in the running.

According to Books LIVE, since the list was made public in 2001 for the first time, on only four previous occasions have no Africans appeared on the longlist: in 2002, 2007, 2008 and 2011. That’s four times in 14 editions of the prize.

The biggest surprise – many would say shock – surrounding the 2014 longlist is the fact that Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer, which has been widely touted as an award candidate this year, doesn’t feature on the longlist at all. This, I might add, is for a title many were tipping not only to feature on the list, but to go on to win.

Another contentious point is the large-scale absence of Commonwealth writers on this year’s longlist, generally sitting at between four and six entries per year, but this time around present only in the lone form of Australian Richard Flanagan. This is a record low for Commonwealth authors, since even 2009 had two authors on the longlist: JM Coetzee with Summertime and Ed O’Loughlin, a Canadian, for Not Untrue & Not Unkind.

No fewer than four, arguably five, American authors (I include Joseph O’Neill who has lived in New York for more than two decades) make the list in 2014: Richard Powers, Karen Joy Fowler, Joshua Ferris and Siri Hustvedt.

The 2010 Man Booker longlist featured one (South) African author, Damon Galgut, with In a Strange Room, and four works from the Commonwealth: The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (both Australia), and February by Lisa Moore (Canada). 2011’s longlist featured no African authors, but three from the Commonwealth, all from Canada: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan and Far to Go by Alison Pick. The longlist for 2012 saw South African André P Brink’s Philida nominated alongside Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil (India) and The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (Malaysia). At a push, we could claim the Malysian as a South African, since he spends much of his time here in Cape Town. 2013 saw one African author, NoViolet Bulawayo (Zimbabwe), for We Need New Names, alongside Commonwealth authors Tash Aw (Malaysia) for Five Star Billionaire, The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (New Zealand) and A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (Canada / United States).

Image source: http://www.themanbookerprize.com/man-booker-prize-2014

Man Booker 2014 longlist (no African authors, one of 13 from the Commonwealth, four from the US):

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (Australia)
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris (US)
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (US)
The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt (US)
Orfeo by Richard Powers (US)
History of the Rain by Niall Williams (Ireland)
The Dog by Joseph O’Neill (Ireland)
J by Howard Jacobson (Britain)
The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth (Britain)
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (Britain)
The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee (Britain)
Us by David Nicholls (Britain)
How to Be Both by Ali Smith (Britain).

Apart from the cash prize of 50 000 pounds for the winning author, the symbolic capital (hype, prestige, awareness, always leading to increased sales figures) makes such prizes highly lucrative. After last year’s winner, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries – a divisive choice, to be sure, both lavishly praised by judges and equally loathed by some readers – this year’s longlist is interesting in that it features as yet unreleased works such as David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks alongside such mesmerisingly unreadable and deliberately “difficult”, intellectual novels such as Hustvedt’s The Blazing World. While perhaps not to everyone’s taste, Orfeo by Richard Powers is quite the opposite to Hustvedt’s novel, in that it achieves the sense of the grandiose and enthralling (and is certainly intellectually engaging) without sacrificing accessibility entirely. Karen Joy Fowler’s novel is similarly intense and brooding, but also offers the reader a magnificent sense of narrative voice and an incredible understanding of intimacy and loss.

As for a possible winner, I would offer a prediction that Powers or Joy Fowler might crack the nod, along with possibles Howard Jacobsen (remember the much lauded and Man Booker-winning The Finkler Question?), the ever-popular and brilliant David Mitchell (a personal favourite) and David Nicholls. However, one can rarely call these matters with any certainty, or have much agreement on who is the most deserving and who not. I’m also not too sure about including books that were unreleased at the time of going to press, but critics are allowed to request advanced copies, or so I’m told. Ah, the life.

As a parting shot: this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, has drawn such vociferous criticism from influential critics across the Pond and in the US that I’m not in the least surprised that she wasn’t nominated for a Booker. A true Marmite book (something that splits them straight down the middle between love and hate) if there ever was one.

To Damon Galgut: you are still the winner to so many of us readers, your dedication to the craft a true inspiration.

 

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