The Man Booker Prize 2012 Longlist

I am very late on this, yet I feel I should still share it with you. On July 25, 2012, the Man Booker Prize organisers released the long list of competing books for 2012. This list consist of 12 books chosen by a panel of judges chaired by Sir Peter Stothard. The longlisted books were selected from a total of 145 titles. The following are the books on the list:
  1. The Yips by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
  2. The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman (Sceptre)
  3. Philida by Andre Brink (Harvill Secker)
  4. The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon Books)
  5. Skios by Michael Frayn (Faber & Faber)
  6. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday)
  7. Swimming Home by Deborah Levy (And Other Stories)
  8. Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)
  9. The Lighthouse by Alison Moore (Salt)
  10. Umbrella by Will Self (Bloomsbury)
  11. Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil (Faber & Faber)
  12. Communion Town by Sam Thompson (Fourth Estate)
According to the Chair of Judges, Peter Stothard:
Goodness, madness and bewildering urban change are among the themes of this year's longlist. In an extraordinary year for fiction the 'Man Booker Dozen' proves the grip that the novel has on our world. We did not set out to reject the old guard but, after a year of sustained critical argument by a demanding panel of judges, the new has come powering through.
Trivias:
According to Man Booker, the longlist includes four debut novelists (Rachel Joyce, Alison Moore, Jeet Thayil and Sam Thompson), three small independent publishers and one previous winner (Hilary Mantel with Wolf Hall). Of the dozen, seven are men and five women; nine are British, one Indian, One South African (Andre Brink) and one Malaysian. The eldest on the list is Michael Frayn at 78 and the youngest is Ned Beauman at 27. According to the BBC, big-name writers who failed to make the longlist included Martin Amis, John Banville, Pat Barker, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith and Rose Tremain.

The shortlist of six authors will be announced at a press conference at the Man Group headquarters on Tuesday 11 September 2012. The winner of the 2012 prize will be announced at a dinner at London's Guildhall on Tuesday 16 October. Each of the six shortlisted writers is awarded 2,500 pounds and the winner receives a further 50,000 pounds.

Comments

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