Man Booker Prize 2011 Longlist

I have been monitoring twitter for the past four hours for this announce. According to the announcement:

A total of 138 books, seven of which were called in by the judges, were considered for the ‘Man Booker Dozen' longlist. They are:
  • Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape - Random House)
  • Sebastian Barry On Canaan's Side (Faber)
  • Carol Birch Jamrach's Menagerie (Canongate Books)
  • Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta)
  • Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent's Tail - Profile)
  • Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)
  • Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger's Child (Picador - Pan Macmillan)
  • Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)
  • Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)
  • A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic)
  • Alison Pick Far to Go (Headline Review)
  • Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
  • D.J. Taylor Derby Day (Chatto & Windus - Random House)
The chair of judges, Dame Stella Rimington, comments:
We are delighted by the quality and breadth of our longlist, which emerged from an impassioned discussion. The list ranges from the Wild West to multi-ethnic London via post-Cold War Moscow and Bucharest, and includes four first novels.
The four first time novelists on the list are Stephen Kelman, A.D. Miller, Yvvette Edwards and Patrick McGuinness. Canadian author Alison Pick, like McGuinness, is a published poet and is joined by fellow Canadians, Patrick deWitt and Esi Edugyan, on the longlist.
The shortlist of six authors will be announced on Tuesday 6 September at a press conference at Man Group's London headquarters. The winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction will be announced on Tuesday 18 October at a dinner at London's Guildhall and will be broadcast on the BBC.
The winner will receive £50,000 and each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, will receive £2,500 and a designer bound edition of their book.
The judges for the 2011 Prize are writer and journalist, Matthew d'Ancona; author, Susan Hill; author and politician, Chris Mullin and Head of Books at the Daily Telegraph, Gaby Wood. Dame Stella Rimington is the Chair.

Comments

  1. Zibilee26 July 2011 at 15:20

    I have only heard of one of these books, but am eager to find out more about them as the time comes closer. Thanks for sharing this with us Nana. I always look forward to the Man Booker every year.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Amy26 July 2011 at 15:23

    Well, I'm excited to see some Canadians on the list! The only book I've read from the list though was Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English which I didn't enjoy at all :P Are any of the titles this year by Africans?

    ReplyDelete
  3. ImageNations26 July 2011 at 15:34

    @Zibilee... I got to hear of some titles when people started guessing the titles/authors likely to be in the longlist

    ReplyDelete
  4. ImageNations26 July 2011 at 15:37

    @Amy there are three Canadians. No... no African made the list. The only one with a Ghanaian name, Esi Edugyan of Half Blood Blues, is a Canadia, perhaps 'born and bread' in Canada.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Amy26 July 2011 at 15:45

    Good about the Canadians but disappointing that they've ignored all of Africa...

    ReplyDelete
  6. ImageNations26 July 2011 at 15:53

    @Amy... yes. Perhaps another time. Planning on reading any of these?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Amy26 July 2011 at 15:54

    Well, I might have to check out the Canadian contributions, especially Esi Edugyan who you mention has a Ghanaian name :)

    ReplyDelete
  8. ImageNations26 July 2011 at 16:05

    @Amy... yes both names are Ghanaian names. I've been reading about her and seems her first book , The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, has part of it set in Ghana; though I am yet to read any biography that has a link to Ghana. Her bio begins with: 'Raised in Calgary ....'

    I'd be happy to read your views. According to reviews it is set in Berlin 1939. Perhaps it might be a whodunit. Check her out here

    http://www.esiedugyan.com/half-blood-blues.html

    ReplyDelete
  9. @parridhlantern26 July 2011 at 19:07

    like yourself I've been watching this via twitter & am not sure what I think of the list, I like the idea of a couple of them, but will need to research more in depth before deciding which to plump for.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Nina26 July 2011 at 19:54

    "Pigeon English" also has a Ghanaian connection of sorts, as I believe it is about a young Ghanaian boy in an estate in the UK. This was already on one of my wish lists; I think I should add Edugyan's novel (and maybe her first one) too!

    ReplyDelete
  11. Amy26 July 2011 at 23:47

    Thanks for the link!

    ReplyDelete
  12. ImageNations27 July 2011 at 07:43

    @PL, I am looking for a review of the list from the guardian books or any other trusted source.

    ReplyDelete
  13. ImageNations27 July 2011 at 07:48

    @Nina, thanks. Haven't read any of the books.

    ReplyDelete
  14. ImageNations27 July 2011 at 07:49

    @Amy you're welcome

    ReplyDelete
  15. ImageNations27 July 2011 at 08:51

    thanks for the info, Omnivore, I am heading there.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Geosi27 July 2011 at 13:31

    I have been late in publishing this... I just noticed I recently purchase one of Sebastian's books who is on the longlist once again.

    ReplyDelete
  17. ImageNations27 July 2011 at 13:51

    You do well in your purchases. Able to spot good books. You can always publish it and it's barely a day old. Most are still in the dark, promise you that.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Marie Cloutier28 July 2011 at 00:39

    I'm excited about the prize as always. I haven't read any of the books (lots of them aren't out the US yet) and I was disappointed not to see China Mieville's name but maybe someday!

    ReplyDelete
  19. ImageNations28 July 2011 at 07:52

    @Marie, I heard it mentioned in a few predictive-list. However, others too claim his/hers is a genre literature. Are genres not literary?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Help Improve the Blog with a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

10. Unexpected Joy at Dawn: My Reading

Image
Title: Unexpected Joy At Dawn Author: Alex Agyei-Agyiri Genre: Novel Publisher: Sub-Saharan Publishers Pages: 331 Year: 2004 Country: Ghana Unexpected Joy at Dawn is a story of two siblings, Nii and Mama Orojo, during the 1983 deportation of Ghanaians from Nigeria under the Shehu Shagari government. Nii, who is a Nigerian by blood but a Ghanaian by birth, was left in Ghana by his parents as they made the tortuous journey to Nigeria when Ghana enacted the Aliens Compliance Order of 1969, which made every person living in Ghana without the required papers an alien. His name was changed to reflect the name of his adopted parents. After fourteen years of living in hardship in Ghana, which involves living in slums even though he was an Assistant Manager at a bank, taking on multiple jobs, not being able to bury a wife and being chased around by market women for purported 'fraud', he decided to go to Nigeria in search of his roots. Besides, he entertained the fears of being...
Read more

69. The Clothes of Nakedness by Benjamin Kwakye, A Review

Image
Title: The Clothes of Nakedness Author: Benjamin Kwakye Publishers: Heinemann African Writers Series Genre: Fiction/Novel/Class Pages: 212 Year of First Publication: 1998 Country: Ghana For the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa Region Winners Reading Challenge Benjamin Kwakye 's novel The Clothes of Nakedness  is a compelling narrative directed at a Ghanaian audience, in particular. It reveals the economic hardships existing in our society; it also reveals the intricately woven relationships between the rich and the poor and how the 'seemingly' rich manipulate the poor to further that wealth-dom in this dual economic society where absolute riches exist side by side with abject poverty. The latter scenario is even more stark and pathetic if one knows that Nima and Kanda Estates, two neighbourhoods presented in the story, are real and not just fictional representation made concrete by Kwakye's brilliant mind. The story revolves around thr...
Read more

42. The Blinkards by Kobina Sekyi

Image
Title: The Blinkards, A Comedy and The Anglo-Fanti - A Short Story Author: Kobina Sekyi Genre: Play/Short Story Pages: 256 Publishers: Heinemann/Readwide ISBN: 978-0-435-92784-4 Year of Publication: 1974 (this edition, 1997) Country: Gold Coast (Now Ghana) Setting:  This book contains two stories: The Blinkards - a play and The Anglo-Fanti - a short story . Though the stories are from two different genres, one theme threads through them: the effect of absolute cultural osmosis or better still the consequences of swallowing an alien culture without much scrutiny, as happened in occupied countries popularly referred to by the occupiers as colonies (colonies of what? Ants? Bees?) Both stories took place in Cape Coast and the setting is very significant to the story. Apart from the author being a Fanti from Cape Coast, Cape Coast was the first point of introduction to colonial rule. As a seaport city, it was the first town that was brought under colonial rule; hence ...
Read more