2023-11-27 00:03:15
Paul Lynch partly wrote Prophet Songa novel with a claustrophobic atmosphere, with blocks of text running over entire pages, during the confinements of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This writer, born in Limerick in 1977 and who lives in Dublin, had already written four novels, including the noted Beyond The Sea et Grace.
A first selection for the short list of the authors
The Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, rewards works of fiction in English. He contributed to the success of writers like Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Arundhati Roy. Last year, Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, 47, won the Booker Prize for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
On this subject: Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka wins the prestigious British Booker Prize
All the novelists selected for this edition – two Americans, a Canadian, two Irish and a Kenyan – were part of the final selection for the first time. The winner receives a reward of 50,000 pounds sterling (around 56,000 francs) and the assurance of international success.
The finalist works of this edition brought “terrors, pleasures, joys and consolation” to the members of the jury, declared its president, the Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan. These novels “offer a full range of human experiences” and transport the reader “not only outside of reality, but also outside of the common language of everyday life,” she described.
Six finalists out of more than 150 books proposed
A total of 158 books, published in the United Kingdom or Ireland between October 1, 2022 and September 30, 2023, were submitted to the Booker Prize foundation. Thirteen of them were selected in a first round.
Other shortlisted novels included Kenyan writer Chetna Maroo’s moving debut Western Lanethe story of a teenage squash enthusiast who loses herself in the sport while she is grieving.
The tragicomic saga The Bee Sting by Irishman Paul Murray – the only one who had already been selected in the first round of the Booker Prize in 2010 – studies the influence of destiny in the economic and existential difficulties encountered by a family in rural Ireland.
If I Survive You by the American writer Jonathan Escoffery also tells the story of a family, Jamaican this time, who leaves Kingston in disaster and must rebuild their lives in the Miami of the 1970s. The work of the second American in the running Paul Harding, This Other Edenis inspired by historical events and relates the life of marginalized people on Apple Island, an enclave off the American coast, under the suspicious eye and increasing constraint of the authorities.
The disturbing Study for Obedienceby Canadian Sarah Bernstein, is a questioning of power and guilt, around the story of a young woman who leaves her birthplace to take care of her brother, and triggers disturbing events.
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