Report by Aarya Krishnan
The Booker Prize, also known as the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is an annual literary award for the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland.
Prize winners get £50,000 and a designer-bound edition of their book and all shortlisted authors, including the winner, are given £2,500.
The winner of the Booker Prize this year is “The Promise” by South African author Damon Galgut,. Damon has been shortlisted for the Prize twice – once in 2003 and again in 2010. He finally won it in 2021.
His award-winning novel this year is a tale that describes the story of a South African family navigating the end of racial discrimination and was touted as “a spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh” by the judges.
Other shortlisted books were –
“No One Is Talking About This” by Patricia Lockwood,
“A Passage North” by Anuk Arudpragasam,
“Bewilderment” by Richard Powers,
“Great Circle” by Maggie Shipstead
“The Fortune Men” by Nadifa Mahamed.
The International Booker Prize is given to a book translated in English and published in UK or Ireland.
This year, the International Booker was awarded to French author David Diop for his unsettling tale, “At Night All Blood Is Black” (translated by Anna Moschovakis) which is about two Senegalese soldiers fighting in the trenches of the First World War.
Contenders for this category were:
“The Employees” by Olga Ravn (translated by Martin Aitken),
“The War of The Poor” by Eric Vuillard (translated by Mark Polizzotti),
“When We Cease to Understand the World” by Benjamin Labatut (translated by Adrien Nathan West),
“In Memory of Memory” by Maria Stepanova (translated by Sasha Dugdale)
“The Dangers of Smoking in Bed” by Mariana Enriquez (translated by Megan McDowell).
There were several honourable mentions in this category that included – “Minor Detail” by Adania Shibli (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette), “Summer Brother” by Jaap Robben (translated by David Doherty), “The Pear Field” by Nana Ekvtimishvili (translated by Elizabeth Heighway), “The Perfect Nine” by Ngugi Wa Thiongó, “Wretchedness” by Andrzej Tichy (translated by Nichola Smalley) and “An Inventory of Losses” by Judith Schalansky (translated by Jackie Smith).
