LONDON, Nov 3, 2021: The winner of Britain’s prestigious Booker
Prize will be announced Wednesday from a diverse shortlist of novels covering
topics from South African apartheid to female pilots and social media.
This year’s finalists vying for the prize at a ceremony in London from 1915
GMT include books by authors from South Africa, Britain, Sri Lanka and the
The United States.
South African playwright Damon Galgut, 57, is tipped to win with his novel
“The Promise” about a white family with a farm outside Pretoria.
Covering the late apartheid era through to Jacob Zuma’s presidency, the
book shows the family’s growing disintegration as the country emerges into
democracy.
The New Yorker called it “remarkable”, while South Africa’s Sunday Times
said, “it’s astonishing how much history Galgut packs into this short novel”.
The prize, whose previous recipients include Salman Rushdie, Margaret
Atwood and Hilary Mantel is one of the leading literary awards for
novels are written in English.
The winner receives a o50,000 ($68,000) prize as well as a career-changing
boost in sales and public profile.
Galgut is one of two previously shortlisted authors, along with US writer
Richard Powers, 64, whose novel “Bewilderment” is about an astrobiologist
struggling to cope with his young son’s behavioral problems.
Another US writer, Patricia Lockwood, 39, was nominated for her debut
the novel, “No One Is Talking About This,” featuring a 30-something obsessed with
social media who has to deal with a shocking medical diagnosis.
Other books look back at 20th-century history.
Sri Lankan writer Anuk Arudpragasam, 33, in his second novel, “A Passage
North”, focuses on the traumatic legacy of the country’s almost three-decade
the civil war that ended in 2009. “The Fortune Men”, by British-Somali author
Nadifa Mohamed, 40, is based on the true story of a Somali sailor wrongly
convicted of murder in Cardiff’s multicultural port in the 1950s. “Great
Circle”, by US novelist Maggie Shipstead, 38, tells the story of a fictional
female pilot hoping to fly around the globe pole-to-pole, interwoven with
the first-person narrative from a Hollywood starlet playing her role.
This year’s televised ceremony at the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London
will be attended by all the shortlisted authors, after Covid restrictions led
to video appearances last year.
The ceremony will include a pre-recorded conversation between Camilla,
Duchess of Cornwall and a long-term Booker advocate, and last year’s laureate
Douglas Stuart, 45, about how winning the prize for his novel “Shuggie Bain”
has affected his life.
