Man Booker Shortlist 2018

The shortlist for the 2018 Man Booker prize has been announced. The books cover a wide range of subjects, from an 11 year-old slave escaping a Barbados sugar plantation, to a D-Day veteran living with post-traumatic stress disorder. Milkman by Belfast born author Anna Burns is set in an unnamed Belfast and features a young woman coming of age during the Troubles.

The shortlisted titles are
Milkman by Anna Burns
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
Everything Under by Daisy Johnson
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
The Overstory by Richard Powers
The Long Take by Robin Robertson

The chair of the judges said “From Ireland to California, in Barbados and the Arctic, they inhabit worlds that not everyone will have been to, but which we can all be enriched by getting to know. Each one explores the anatomy of pain — among the incarcerated and on a slave plantation, in a society fractured by sectarian violence, and even in the natural world. But there are also in each of them moments of hope. These books speak very much to our moment, but we believe that they will endure."

The Man Booker Prize is open to writers of any nationality writing in English and published in the UK and Ireland. The winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced on Tuesday 16th October. Donal Ryan’s From a Low and Quiet Sea and Sally Rooney’s Normal People, which had both been longlisted, did not make it through to the shortlist stage.