They will also take part in a digital event for Hay Festival’s Winter Weekend, which runs from 24-28 November at .ĭouglas Stuart won the 2020 Booker Prize for Fiction with his debut novel Shuggie Bain. The winner will be interviewed live online in their first public event on Tuesday 9 November in partnership with Guardian Live. There will also be two hybrid in-person and digital public events featuring interviews with and readings from the authors: at Coventry University, as part of the UK City of Culture 2021 celebrations, on Friday 29 October, 7.30pm, chaired by Lemn Sissay (booking details to follow) and at Southbank Centre on Sunday 31 October, 7.30pm chaired by Kit de Waal. In the meantime, BBC Radio 4’s Front Row is running its successful Booker Prize Book Groups for a third year with each of the six shortlisted books and authors. The winner of the 2021 Booker Prize receives £50,000 and can expect international recognition. It will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, BBC iPlayer, and BBC News Channel. The 2021 winner will be announced on Wednesday 3 November in an award ceremony held in partnership with the BBC at Broadcasting House’s Radio Theatre. While each book is immersive in itself, together they are an expansive demonstration of what fiction is doing today.’ And some have global sweep, following a mid-century aviator in her attempt to circumnavigate the planet, and a present-day astrobiologist raising a son haunted by climate change. Some enter communities in the throes of historical transformation: the Cardiff docklands in the early years of British decolonisation, and the veld around Pretoria in the last years of apartheid. Some are acutely introspective, taking us into the mind of a Tamil man tracing the scars of Sri Lanka’s civil war, and an American woman unplugging from the internet to cope with a family crisis.
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‘Perhaps appropriately for our times, these novels share an interest in how individuals are both animated and constrained by forces larger than themselves.
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We are pleased to present a shortlist that delivers as wide a range of original stories as it does voices and styles. ‘With so many ambitious and intelligent books before us, the judges engaged in rich discussions not only about the qualities of any given title, but often about the purpose of fiction itself. The six books were chosen by the 2021 judging panel: historian Maya Jasanoff (chair) writer and editor Horatia Harrod actor Natascha McElhone twice Booker-shortlisted novelist and professor Chigozie Obioma and writer and former Archbishop Rowan Williams.
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Nadifa Mohamed (British/Somali) - The Fortune Men(Viking, Penguin General, PRH).
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Patricia Lockwood (American) - No One Is Talking About This(Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing).Damon Galgut (South African) - The Promise (Chatto & Windus, Vintage, PRH).Anuk Arudpragasam (Sri Lankan) - A Passage North (Granta Books, Granta Publications).Readers of the six shortlisted books will explore life, memory and trauma in the devastating wake of Sri Lanka’s 30-year civil war visit Pretoria during South Africa’s transition out of apartheid to watch the undoing of a white South African family unpick the absurdities of our relentless exposure to social media when faced with the reality of human loss witness a real-life battle against conspiracy, prejudice and a wrongful conviction for murder as a Somali seaman is hanged in Cardiff in the 1950s experience the intense and moving love a father has for his troubled son as he pursues an experimental neurological therapy and searches for life on other planets and travel through decades to learn of the enthralling, interwoven stories of two women: a mid-20th century aviator and a 21st century Hollywood star. The list was chosen from 158 novels published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2020 and 30 September 2021.The Booker Prize for Fiction is open to works by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.