August 1, 2023, 10:43am
The freshly announced “Booker’s dozen” of titles longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize is making its way around the literary internet, so let’s see what the morning tides have brought in. There are four debut novelists on the list, and Irish writers nabbed a record four out of the 13 nominations (Éirinn go brách!). Pulitzer prize winner Paul Harding is on the list, as is the debut effort of Chetna Maroo, who previously won The Paris Review’s 2022 Plimpton Prize for Fiction.
If you want to participate in the discourse, you must get your hands on these titles ASAP (I imagine the folk at Bookshop are updating the blurbs as we speak). Or, you could get on my schedule, where you read them two years after the buzz has died down, and bother everyone with your conviction then that the book is amazing.
Here’s the longlist:
Tan Twan Eng, The House of Doors
Paul Murray, The Bee Sting
Chetna Maroo, Western Lane
Martin MacInnes, In Ascension
Paul Lynch, Prophet Song
Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow, All the Little Bird-Hearts
Siân Hughes, Pearl
Paul Harding, This Other Eden
Elaine Feeney, How to Build a Boat
Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You
Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience
Sebastian Barry, Old God’s Time
Ayobami Adebayo, A Spell of Good Things
This year’s judges are novelist Esi Edugyan (chair); actor, writer and director Adjoa Andoh; poet, lecturer, editor and critic Mary Jean Chan; Professor James Shapiro; and actor and writer Robert Webb.
The shortlist will be announced on September 21. Novelists and fiction crafters, start your engines.