The Booker Prize 2022, formerly known as the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize, is a literary prize awarded each year for the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives international publicity which usually leads to a sales boost.
The prestigious literary award was formerly recognized as the Booker Prize for fiction and the Man Booker Prize, spanning a 53-year history with its first recipient in 1969. The winners of this prestigious accolade will be announced on 17th October 2022 at Roundhouse in London, England.
The winner of the literary award will receive a cash prize of £50,000. Britain’s Booker Prize has released its 2022 shortlist of six candidates – including the oldest writer to be nominated and the shortest-ever novel.
Alan Garner, who will turn 88 on the day the winner is announced, is marking two milestones after his nomination for Treacle Water. The novel comes in at 116 pages – making it the shortest in length and word count to ever make the list of candidates.
This charming little book titled, “Treacle Water”, is both an excellent introduction to Garner’s writing and also a capstone on his long career. Weaving folklore and myth into this tale, Garner has a talent for showing magic spilling into everyday objects.
The story is a celebration of the archaic and explores how time can move and yet seem to stand still, both through images and characters. The dialogue is quirky and timeless, concrete yet somehow elusive. A must-read treat of a book.
After being whittled down from an original longlist of 13 in July, the shortlist also features Zimbabwean-born novelist NoViolet Bulawayo, 40, for a second time in her writing career with her novel Glory. It is the author’s second book.
This bold novel follows the fall of the Old Horse, the long-serving leader of a fictional country, and the drama that follows a rumbustious nation of animals on the path to true liberation. Inspired by the unexpected fall by a coup in November 2017 of Robert G. Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president of nearly four decades, Glory shows a country’s imploding, narrated by a chorus of animal voices that unveil the ruthlessness required to uphold the illusion of absolute power and the imagination and bulletproof optimism to overthrow it completely.
By immersing readers in the daily lives of a population in upheaval, Bulawayo reveals the dazzling life force and irresistible wit that lie barely concealed beneath the surface of seemingly bleak circumstances.
Sri Lankan-born writer Shehan Karunatilaka, 47, is the second of the two international authors on the list, nominated for his book The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler, and closet queen, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office.
His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers, and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster around can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali.
He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka. Ten years after his prizewinning novel Chinaman established him as one of Sri Lanka’s foremost authors, Shehan Karunatilaka is back with a mordantly funny, searing satire. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a state-of-the-nation epic that proves yet again that the best fiction offers the ultimate truth.
American writer and professor Percival Everett, 65, continues the list with his work Trees, which is the independent publisher Influx Press’s first time appearing in the Booker Prize. An uncanny literary thriller addressing the painful legacy of lynching in the US, by the author of TelephonePercival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi.
When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.
The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot.
As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence and does so in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away.
The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.
American novelist Elizabeth Strout, 66, features for Oh William! The story follows the journey of Lucy Barton a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William, she confesses, has always been a mystery to me.
Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are. So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret—one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us.
What happens next is nothing less than another example of what Hilary Mantel has called Elizabeth Strout’s “perfect attunement to the human condition.” There are fears and insecurities, simple joys and acts of tenderness, and revelations about affairs and other spouses, parents, and their children.
On every page of this exquisite novel, we learn more about the quiet forces that hold us together—even after we’ve grown apart.
At the heart of this story is the indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who offers a profound, lasting reflection on the very nature of existence. “This is the way of life,” Lucy says: “the many things we do not know until it is too late.”
Irish writer Claire Keegan, 54, rounds off the list with Small Things Like These. It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces his busiest season.
Read:
Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery that forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
Already an international bestseller, this book is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.
