The News
The Booker Prize shortlist was announced Monday, with five of the six chosen novels written by women — a first in the globally-recognized literary competition’s 55-year history.
The prize honors fiction in English written by authors of any nationality published in the UK and Ireland. The judges said the shortlisted works highlighted “the fault lines of our times,” but were not “books about issues.”
“Publishing is dominated at certain levels by women, but the literary recognition has still seemed to be reserved for men,” one of the judges, Sara Collins, said according to The Guardian. Even the most recognized women writers are “perhaps undersung” in terms of their commercial success, she added.
The nominated titles included Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, Percival Everett’s James, Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, Anne Michaels’ Held, and Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional. The winner will be announced on Nov. 12.
“Over the years, the prize has created literary sensations and capped illustrious careers,” The New York Times noted, including that of literary giants, like Salman Rushdie and Hilary Mantel.
Part of its endurance, The Guardian wrote in a 2021 op-ed, is in part due to the fact that the Booker has become an “energising force in the publishing industry, one that presents a mass readership with books that the market alone would rarely bring to prominence.”