(London) Two Canadian writers are among the 13 semi-finalists announced Tuesday for the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction.
Canadian-American author Claire Messud is in the running for her novel This Strange Eventful Historywhich features several generations of a Franco-Algerian family.
Canadian novelist and poet Anne Michaels is also among the semi-finalists with her book Heldtelling the story of a World War I fighter and the impact it had on his later life.
Five American writers are also among the semi-finalists, including Rachel Kushner, Percival Everett and Tommy Orange.
Arapaho and Cheyenne author Tommy Orange is the first Indigenous semi-finalist for the £50,000 (C$89,000) Booker Prize. He was shortlisted for his book Wandering Stars.
Percival Everett is nominated for Jameswhich reinvents Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain from the perspective of its black main character, the slave Jim. Everett was a 2022 Booker finalist for The Trees.
Rachel Kushner, who was a Booker finalist in 2018 for her book The Mars Room is back in the running with the spy story Creation Lake.
Pulitzer winner and 2018 and 2021 finalist Richard Powers is on the long list with Playgrounda story of money, power and climate change set on a Polynesian island.
The other American writer nominated is Rita Bullwinkel for Headshot.
Writers from the UK, Ireland, Australia and the Netherlands complete the list, which includes My Friends by the Anglo-Libyan author Hisham Matar and The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, the first ever Dutch Booker semi-finalist.
Artist and writer Edmund de Waal, who chairs the five-member jury, said the shortlist included “books that explore what it means to belong, to be displaced and to return,” with settings ranging from a small Irish town to a convent in Australia and from the deep oceans to outer space.
Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers and is open to novels from any country published in the UK and Ireland. Last year’s winner was Irish writer Paul Lynch for his work on post-democratic dystopia Prophet Song.
A shortlist of six finalists will be announced on September 16, and this year’s winner will be announced on November 12 at a ceremony in London.