Margaret Atwood, Lucy Ellmann, Bernardine Evaristo, Chigozie Obioma, Salman Rushdie and Elif Shafak are today, Tuesday 3 September, announced as the six authors shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction.
The shortlist was announced this morning (3 September) by the 2019 Chair of Judges Peter Florence, at a press conference at London’s British Library. He said, “Like all great literature, these books teem with life, with a profound and celebratory humanity”.
The shortlist was selected from 151 submitted books. It offers an insight into different worlds from the dystopian setting of Gilead, the monologue of an Ohio housewife and the tragicomic tale of a travelling salesman in America; to mostly female, mostly Black, British lives across generations, the trials of a young Nigerian man on a quest to improve his prospects and true allegiances within the brothels of Istanbul.
The 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction is open to writers of any nationality, writing in English and published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2018 and 30 September 2019.
The 2019 shortlist is:
- Margaret Atwood (Canada), The Testaments (Chatto & Windus)
- Lucy Ellmann (UK/USA), Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press)
- Bernardine Evaristo (UK), Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton)
- Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria), An Orchestra of Minorities (Little Brown)
- Salman Rushdie (UK/India), Quichotte (Jonathan Cape)
- Elif Shafak (Turkey/UK), 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (Viking)
