The Booker Prize 2022 winner announcement is nearly upon us. One author will be awarded £50,000 from a selection of 169 novels that were published in the UK and Ireland between October 1st, 2021, and September 30th, 2022.
The 6 finalists will attend the Roundhouse on Monday 17th October in an award ceremony of prestigious tradition.
‘Together, these six novels look at history and at the lives of individuals with wit, courage and rage, allowing us to see the world through many sets of supremely perceptive eyes’
Gaby Wood, Director of the Booker Prize Foundation
The Shortlist
Neil MacGregor, Chair of the 2022 judges, says:
‘These six books we believe speak powerfully about important things. Set in different places at different times, they are all about events that in some measure happen everywhere, and concern us all. Each written in English, they demonstrate what an abundance of Englishes there are, how many distinct worlds, real and imaginary, exist in that simple-seeming space, the Anglosphere.
Neil MacGregot, Chair of the 2022 judges
‘Two — Oh, William! and Treacle Walker — are about the inner life, as a young boy and a middle-aged woman, in their particular ways, come to a new understanding of who they are and what they might become. The other four books address long national histories of cruelty and injustice, in Sri Lanka and Ireland, Zimbabwe and the United States, and in each case the enduring historical tensions provide the dilemmas in which the characters, like their societies, are put on the rack.
Why did we choose these six?
‘In every one, the author uses language not only to tell us what happens, but to create a world which we, outsiders, can enter and inhabit — and not merely by using words from local languages or dialects. NoViolet Bulawayo’s incantatory repetitions induct us all into a Zimbabwean community of memory and expectation, just as Alan Garner’s shamanic obliquities conjure a realm that reason alone could never access. Percival Everett and Shehan Karunatilaka spin fantastical verbal webs of Gothic horror — and humour — that could not be further removed from the hypnotic, hallucinatory clarity of Claire Keegan’s and Elizabeth Strout’s pared-down prose. Most important, all affirm the importance and the power of finding and sharing the truth.’
The previous winner was Damon Galgut for his novel, The Promise, which sold 1,925% more copies in the UK than it had in the 2 weeks prior. May the winner of this year’s event receive the same success.
Good luck to them all
