Claire Keegan, Percival Everett among six international authors on 2022 Booker Prize shortlist
CBC Books | | Posted: September 6, 2022 7:59 PM | Last Updated: September 6, 2022
International bestselling authors Claire Keegan and Percival Everett are among the six authors who have made the 2022 Booker Prize shortlist.
The £50,000 ($75,752 Cdn) Booker Prize annually recognizes the best original novel written in the English language and published in the U.K.
Keegan is shortlisted for Small Things Like These.
Small Things Like These explores themes of complicity and human decency. At 116 pages, it is the shortest book to be recognized in the prize's history.
Set in Ireland in the mid-1980s, Small Things Like These is a moving tale of faith, forgiveness and the authority of the Catholic Church. The book's protagonist, Bill Furlong, is faced with a moral dilemma when he discovers a shivering, ragged girl locked in the shed of a local convent.
Small Things Like These won the 2022 Orwell Prize for political fiction and was also a 2022 Rathbones Folio Prize finalist for the best literary work of the year.
Keegan is the Irish author of prize-winning short fiction, including two story collections Antarctica and Walk the Blue Fields.
LISTEN | Claire Keegan on Writers and Company:
Everett is shortlisted for the novel The Trees.
The Trees is Everett's 22nd novel. Following a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Miss., a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive only to meet resistance and a string of racist white townsfolk.
As similar murders occur across the country, the detectives suspect the killings are a wave of retribution for Emmett Till and the legacy of lynching in the American South.
Everett is an American writer based in Los Angeles and a professor of English at the University of Southern California. In addition to writing more than 30 books, he's also an accomplished visual artist and has worked for 12 years training horses and mules.
LISTEN | Percival Everett on Writers and Company:
The complete six-book shortlist is:
- Glory by Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo
- The Trees by American author Percival Everett
- Treacle Walker by English novelist Alan Garner
- The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka
- Small Things Like These by Irish author Claire Keegan
- Oh William! by American novelist and author Elizabeth Strout
The titles on this year's shortlist and 13-book longlist were selected from 169 novels published between Oct. 1, 2021 and Sept. 30, 2022 and submitted to the prize by publishers.
The six shortlisted authors represent five different nationalities and four continents, with an equal split of men and women on the list. Bulawayo makes her second shortlist appearance with Glory, following We Need New Names in 2013.
The 2022 jury is comprised of cultural historian, writer and broadcaster Neil MacGregor, academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari, historian Helen Castor, novelist and critic M. John Harrison and novelist, poet and professor Alain Mabanckou.
The majority of the shortlist is inspired by real events, from the Sri Lankan civil war and the fall of Mugabe to the Magdalene laundries scandal and the murder of Emmett Till. The list also features the oldest author ever to be shortlisted: Garner will celebrate his 88th birthday on the night of the winner ceremony.
"These six books we believe speak powerfully about important things. Set in different places at different times, they are all about events that in some measure happen everywhere, and concern us all. Each written in English, they demonstrate what an abundance of Englishes there are, how many distinct worlds, real and imaginary, exist in that simple-seeming space, the Anglosphere," the jury said in a press statement.
The six shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 ($3,787 Cdn) and a specially bound edition of their book. The winner will be announced on Oct. 17, 2022.
Since 2013, authors from any nationality have been eligible. No Canadians were recognized for the 2022 prize. Canadian authors Mary Lawson and Rachel Cusk made the Booker Prize longlist in 2021.
Margaret Atwood shared the 2019 prize with British novelist Bernardine Evaristo. Atwood was recognized for her novel The Testaments, and Evaristo for her novel Girl, Woman, Other. They split the prize money evenly.
Two other Canadians have won the prize since its inception in 1969: Michael Ondaatje in 1992 for The English Patient and Yann Martel in 2002 for Life of Pi.