The prestigious Booker Prize, which rewards works of fiction in English, will be awarded on Sunday evening in London to one of the six authors still in the running, all in the final selection for the first time.
Only one of these novelists — two Americans, a Canadian, two Irish and a Kenyan — had already passed a first round of selection, and none of them had reached the coveted “shortlist”.
The Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, has contributed to the success of writers like Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood.
The winner receives a reward of 50,000 pounds (around $85,000) and the assurance of international success.
The finalist works of this edition brought “terrors, pleasures, joys and consolation” to the members of the jury, declared its president, the Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan.
They transported the reader “not only outside of reality, but also outside of the common language of everyday life,” she described.
Over 150 books published in the UK or Ireland between 1er October 2022 and September 30, 2023 were submitted, and 13 of them were selected in a first round.
Among the finalists, the moving first novel by Kenyan writer Chetna Maroo, Western Lanedeals with grief and sisterhood, following a teenager who is passionate about squash.
Darker, the dystopian work Prophet Songby Irish author Paul Lynch, is set in Dublin and tells the story of a country descending into tyranny.
The tragicomic saga The Bee Stingby his compatriot Paul Murray – the only one who had already been selected for the prize in 2010 – studies the role of fate in the difficulties encountered by an Irish family.
If I Survive Youby American writer Jonathan Escoffery, also tells the story of a family, Jamaican this time, and their chaotic new life in Miami in the 1970s.
The work of the second American Paul Harding, This Other Edenis inspired by historical events and relates the arrival of misfits on Apple Island, off the American coast, to build a new home.
The disturbing Study for Obedienceby Canadian Sarah Bernstein, is a questioning of power and guilt, around the story of a young woman who leaves her birthplace to take care of her brother.
Last year, Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, 47, won the Booker Prize for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeidaa story of murder with black humor during the civil war which ravaged the country in the 1990s.