Booker Prize For Fiction 2022 Shortlist Announced, List Includes Oldest Author And Shortest Book

The Booker Prize is awarded to the best-sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.

New Delhi: A shortlist of six books for the Booker Prize 2022 has been announced from a list of 13 books. This year's list contains the name of the oldest author and the shortest book ever to be nominated. Each year, the winner is awarded £50,000 (Rs 45,84,865 approx), while £2,500 is given to other shortlisted authors. The winner will be announced on October 17, in London.

The six shortlisted books are Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, Treacle Walker by Alan Garner, The Trees by Percival Everett, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, and Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout.

The Booker Prize is awarded to the best-sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.

This year's shortlist includes, six authors who represent five different nationalities and four continents, with an equal split of men and women. Alan Garner, 87, is the oldest author ever to be shortlisted, while Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is the shortest book at 116 pages.

The panel of judges for 2022 chaired by cultural historian, writer and broadcaster Neil MacGregor include academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari, historian Helen Castor, novelist and critic M John Harrison, and novelist, poet and professor Alain Mabanckou.

MacGregor, while making the announcement at the ceremony said "several of the books are inspired by real events and address long national histories of cruelty and injustice, in Sri Lanka and Ireland, Zimbabwe and the United States”, reported AP.

“Set in different places at different times, they are all about events that in some measure happen everywhere, and concern us all,” he said of the shortlisted books.

The Booker Prize was founded in 1969. It has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers and was originally open only to British, Irish and Commonwealth writers. Eligibility was expanded in 2014 to all novels in English published in the U.K.

Last year’s winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction was “The Promise,” by South Africa’s Damon Galgut.