Irish writers, debuts – and groundbreaking sci-fi: the Booker longlist in depth

The list is out … The Booker longlist 2023. Photograph: The Booker prize

Irish writers, debuts – and groundbreaking sci-fi: the Booker longlist in depth

This article is more than 3 months old

The personal meets the political in a list that includes dystopia and SF as well as little-known debuts
 Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Justine Jordan
Tuesday 1 August 2023

Those accustomed to complaining about the number of American writers nominated for the Booker prize since the widening of eligibility in 2014 will get a pleasant surprise this year: the sector that leads is Irish writers – and people called Paul. That’s not the only surprise; the judges have chosen to spotlight some little-known debuts in the place of major novels. While it feels reductive to read the longlist in terms of what’s not included, many will have expected to see Zadie Smith’s September novel The Fraud, and Tom Crewe’s acclaimed debut The New Life, among others.

The presence of four Irish writers, meanwhile, is far from surprising (and that’s without the inclusion of Anne Enright’s fine forthcoming novel The Wren, The Wren, or Claire Kilroy’s scorching tale of new motherhood, Soldier Sailor). Sebastian Barry is a veteran author who pushes himself with each new book, and Old God’s Time is a devastating, dreamlike study of the lifetime repercussions of historic childhood abuse in Catholic institutions. Paul Murray, loved for 2010’s tragicomic Skippy Dies, writes the novel of his career with The Bee Sting, which uncovers a family’s slow-burning secrets against a backdrop of climate anxiety – in terms of pure page-turning pleasure, this is probably the most enjoyable novel on the list. Elaine Feeney’s How to Build a Boat explores the meaning of community and outsiderdom through one boy’s story, while Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, scheduled for September, is a chilling study of Ireland becoming a fascist state.

 

Illustration: Tim Bouckley

‘It took me a decade’: the 2023 Booker prize shortlisted authors on the stories behind their novels

Paul Murray, Chetna Maroo, Paul Lynch, Jonathan Escoffery, Sarah Bernstein, Paul Harding

Saturday 18 November 2023

Paul Murray

The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton)

 Photograph: Patrick Bolger/

I started writing The Bee Sting at the end of 2017. I’d spent the previous 18 months working on a screenplay and I was aching to get back to the freedom and possibility of a novel. But for a long time I couldn’t decide what to write. I had three very different ideas and I started making notes for each one: blocking out scenes, tracing character arcs, all that. Looking back, I can see I was nervous about beginning something new after being away from fiction for so long, and trying to prove to myself that it would work. But notes don’t tell you anything about a novel’s voice, which is the most important thing about it, and which you won’t discover until you actually start to write.

 

The Booker judge Esi Edugyan described the shortlist discussions as ‘often enthralling, sometimes intimate, sometimes charged’.

Just one British writer makes the Booker prize shortlist

This article is more than 1 month old

Chetna Maroo’s ‘mesmerising’ Western Lane has been chosen on a male-dominated list

 ‘Portraits of what it means to be alive today’: how we chose the 2023 Booker prize shortlist

Ella Creamer

Thursday 21 September 2023

Just one novel by a British writer has made the shortlist for this year’s Booker prize: Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. The list is also weighted towards male writers for the first time in eight years.

Four of the six shortlist places went to novels by men: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, This Other Eden by Paul Harding, and If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery. Study for Obedience by the Canadian writer Sarah Bernstein completes the list. None of the six authors have been shortlisted for the prize before.

Interracial sensitivity … Jonathan Escoffery. Photograph: Cola Greenhill-Casados

Review

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery review – dazzling debut of racial identity

Eight linked short stories, set mostly in Miami, vividly evoke the experiences of a young Black man in search of a sense of belonging

Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Ian Williams

Thursday 2 February 2023

Y

ou wake up and discover your friend in your kitchen, boiling eggs and reading your copy of Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You. You debate. Is it autobiographical? A novel or a short-story collection? Does the book, like the protagonist, seem unhappy with whatever it is? Why does Escoffery use the second-person point of view so much?