Jack Reacher creator Lee Child among 2020 Booker Prize jurors
Lee Child will be on the panel of judges for the 2020 Booker Prize.
Child is best known for his highly successful Jack Reacher novels, which have been adapted into two films starring Tom Cruise. Child's books are also being adapted for television by Amazon.
Child will be joined by writer Emily Wilson, a world-renowned classics scholar, Prospect Magazine critic Sameer Rahim and Lemn Sissay, who was the official poet of the London 2012 Olympics.
The jury will chaired by Margaret Busby, the U.K.'s first black woman publisher.
The jury will consider books published in the U.K. between Oct. 1, 2019 and Sept. 30, 2020.
The Booker Prize is valued at £50,000 (approx. $85,000 Cdn).
The longlist will be announced in July and the winner will be announced on Oct. 27, 2020.
In 2019 the Booker Prize was awarded to two books: Girl, Woman, Other by British author Bernardine Evaristo and The Testaments by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood.
Girl, Woman, Other follows the stories of 12 black British women. Evaristo traces the lives of these characters from the beginning of the 20th century to now in vivid and visceral prose.
The Testaments is the sequel to Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Set 15 years later, the novel includes the "explosive testaments" of three women. The book answers questions on the inner-workings of Gilead, the oppressive dystopia where Offred, the novel's original narrator, was stripped of her freedoms and forced to be a handmaid for powerful men.
2019 was the third time the Booker Prize resulted in a tie. It first happened in 1974 when it was shared by Nadine Gordimer and Stanley Middleton, and then again in 1992 when Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje and English writer Barry Unsworth were co-winners.
Atwood donated half of her Booker Prize winnings to Indspire, a charity that provides scholarships and bursaries to Indigenous people in Canada.
The only other Canadians to have won the Booker besides Atwood and Ondaatje are Yann Martel, who won in 2002 for the novel Life of Pi, and Eleanor Catton won in 2013 for her novel The Luminaries. Catton was born in Canada, but primarily grew up in New Zealand.