The Man Booker Prize is given annually to the best work of fiction written in English and published in the UK in the previous year. Notable past winners include Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi, and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. Last year marked the first time that novelists working outside of the UK and Commonwealth countries were eligible for the prize, which ultimately went to Australian writer Richard Flanagan for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Today, the Man Group released the shortlist for this year’s prize. While the 2014 shortlist wasn’t exactly the most diverse group of writers around—we got three Britons, two Americans, and the Aussie—this year, the nominees are taken from a broader range of countries. Tom McCarthy (Satin Island) and Sunjeev Sahota (The Year of the Runaways) both hail from the UK, while Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life) and Anne Tyler (A Spool of Blue Thread) represent the United States. Nigeria’s Chigozie Obioma (The Fishermen) and Jamaica’s Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings) round out the list.
Perhaps more notable than the presence of Obioma and James is the absence of a prominent American writer: as The Guardian points out, Marilynne Robinson, whose Lila was longlisted for the award, didn’t make the cut despite having won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US. Robinson has also won the Pulitzer Prize and in 2012 was the recipient of a National Humanities Medal from President Obama (who made a point of signaling her work as having profoundly changed his life). So she probably doesn’t feel the snub.
The winner of the Man Booker Prize will be announced on October 13.
