Who will win the Man Booker Prize this year?
With just days to go before the winner of the most awaited literary award is announced, we look at the names who made the cut - including ex-Hong Kong academic Madeleine Thien, the bookies' favourite
Consistently the most compelling prize in literature – the award that sets the book world buzzing for three months each year between the announcement of the longlist in July and the winner in October – The Man Booker Prize is, it’s safe to say, all about stories. There are the stories it judges year after year, and the narratives the competition itself throws up. One could summarise the entire 1980s as: Wot? No Martin Amis? Again? Two years ago, after novelists from the United States were permitted to enter, it was: “The Americans are coming. (Remind me again: why are the Americans coming?)”
This year’s central theme is probably (to misquote an old Radiohead song title): “Big Authors – Don’t Have Any.” Fiona Wilson caught the mood, writing in The Times newspaper: “This year’s Man Booker longlist gives you that distinct feeling of opening an exam paper and realising that barely anything you have revised has come up.”
If you are familiar with any of the six shortlisted survivors from an initial 155 then you are A ) A genuine fan; B ) Very well-read; or C) A relation. They are:
Paul Beatty, US, The Sellout, Oneworld
Deborah Levy, UK, Hot Milk, Hamish Hamilton
Ottessa Moshfegh, US, Eileen, Jonathan Cape
