2023 Booker Prize Longlist
Paul Murray, The Bee Sting
Chetna Maroo, Western Lane
Martin MacInnes, In Ascension
Paul Lynch, Prophet Song
Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow, All the Little Bird-Hearts
Siân Hughes, Pearl
Paul Harding, This Other Eden
Elaine Feeney, How to Build a Boat
Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You
Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience
Sebastian Barry, Old God’s Time
Ayobami Adebayo, A Spell of Good Things
Huzzah for the 2023 Booker Prize longlist. To recap recent Booker Prize history: In 2014 the Booker Prize was expanded from "writers from the Commonwealth" to "all English language writers who have had books published in the UK". This was a controversial move at the time. In 2019 the Man Booker Prize lost its sponsor, and after a couple years where American authors dominated the longlist and won in back-to-back years (2016, 2017) the pendulum swung back to authors from the Commonwealth.
This year the longlist only has two Americans: Pulitzer Prize author Paul Harding and Jonathan Escoffery. Ireland got four writers on the longlist, tying "British" which included English, Scottish and Welsh writers. According to my inside source- a former judge for the old Costa Prize, the favorite is Irish writer Sebastian Barry who has been shortlisted twice (2005, 2008), longlisted once (2011) and has won the Costa Book of the Year Award twice (2008, 2017). Seems like he's due, and Old God's Time had a particularly compelling ending, which is something I believe the Booker Prize judges look for in their winner. Whatever the description of the winner it tends to be a compulsively readable text.
I wouldn't count out Paul Harding, who managed to win the Pulitzer for his debut novel despite being largely ignored by the American literary establishment I thoroughly enjoyed In Ascension by Martin MacInnes, but is hard to see a genre title making it the shortlist let alone winning. My English source tells me that there is a lot of "buzz" for The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray.
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