The judges for this year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction yesterday announced the longlist of finalists. The list features thirteen books, including titles by five first-time authors as well as perennial favorite Salman Rushdie, who earlier this month was awarded the Best of the Booker Award for Midnight's Children (Jonathan Cape, 1981). The Man Booker Dozen, as the longlist is called, was chosen from 112 entries. The annual prize is given for the best novel published in the current year and is open to writers from the British Commonwealth and the Republic of Ireland. The longlist of finalists are:
The White Tiger (Atlantic) by Aravind Adiga
Girl in a Blue Dress (Tindal Street) by Gaynor Arnold
The Secret Scripture (Faber) by Sebastian Barry
From A to X (Verso) by John Berger
The Lost Dog (Chatto) by Michelle de Kretser
Sea of Poppies (John Murray) by Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs (Virago) by Linda Grant
A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Jonathan Cape) by Mohammed Hanif
The Northern Clemency (Fourth Estate) by Philip Hensher
Netherland (Fourth Estate) by Joseph O’Neill
The Enchantress of Florence (Jonathan Cape) by Salman Rushdie
Child 44 (Simon & Schuster) by Tom Rob Smith
A Fraction of the Whole (Hamish Hamilton) by Steve Toltz
The judges are Michael Portillo, Alex Clark, Louise Doughty, James Heneage, and Hardeep Singh Kohli. "The judges are pleased with the geographical balance of the longlist with writers from Pakistan, India, Australia, Ireland, and UK," Portillo told the Bookseller. "We also are happy with the interesting mix of books, five first novels and two novels by former winners. The list covers an extraordinary variety of writing."
The shortlist will be announced on September 9; the winner will be named on October 14.
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