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The Sisters Brothers (Ecco, 2011), Patrick deWitt’s Booker-nominated picaresque western novel about two assassin brothers during the California Gold Rush, has been adapted into a feature film. Directed by Jacques Audiard, the film stars Riz Ahmed, Jake Gyllenhaal, Rutger Hauer, Carol Kane, Joaquin Phoenix, and John C. Reilly.
“This tonight is culture, it’s international culture, it’s compassionate culture, it’s activist culture—it’s a room full of believers…” In this video, George Saunders accepts the 2017 Man Booker Prize for his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury, 2017). Saunders is the second American in a row to win the award.
“Almost every great novelist has got a comedian in him, in her, somewhere or other.” Man Booker Prize–winning author Howard Jacobson speaks about the necessity of failure and comedy in literature, and what makes a novel funny.
“Language is tough. Using the right words is so important to me.” Paul Beatty, author of the Man Booker Prize–winning novel, The Sellout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), speaks about the labor of writing and his advice to students on Late Night With Seth Meyers.
In this book trailer, Richard Flanagan, winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize, narrates a selection from his forthcoming novel, First Person, to be published by Knopf in 2018. Written in the style of a memoir, the novel follows a struggling writer who has six weeks to ghostwrite the memoir of a con artist.
“I don’t want to get all dramatic—‘writing saved my life’ or anything like that—but writing’s given me a life.” In this video, Paul Beatty talks about freedom and censorship within writing in his acceptance speech for the 2016 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Beatty, who was honored for his novel The Sellout (Oneworld, 2016), is the first American author to win the award.
“I decided that she was a cross between Tina Turner and maybe Walter Benjamin or Baudelaire, perhaps a little bit of Angela Carter’s wonderful aerialist in Nights at the Circus...” Deborah Levy, whose novel Hot Milk (Bloomsbury, 2016) is shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, reads from and talks about her inspiration and the characters in her dramatic verse book, An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell (And Other Stories, 2014).
At the Wheeler Centre, Hanya Yanagihara speaks about how her novel A Little Life (Doubleday, 2015) is “willfully out of step” with contemporary literature. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and National Book Award in 2015, the novel has been optioned by producer Scott Rudin as a limited series.
“If you look at the Greek myths, they’re always about unhappy families; Aristotle told us that politics starts in the family—I think that’s true.” Deborah Levy, whose most recent novel, Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton, 2016), is shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, talks about the elements of family in Hamlet that have always haunted her. This video is part of the Hay Festival: Talking About Shakespeare video series celebrating William Shakespeare’s four hundredth anniversary.
In this video, Ottessa Moshfegh accepts the 2016 PEN/Hemingway Award for her debut novel, Eileen (Jonathan Cape, 2016). The book is one of four debut novels longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.
