LONDON (AP) — Six American writers, including Rachel Kushner, Percival Everett and Tommy Orange, are among 13 semifinalists announced Tuesday for the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction.
Pulitzer Prize-winning Cheyenne and Arapaho author Orange is the first Native American Booker semi-finalist for the £50,000 ($64,000) prize with his century-spanning saga “Wandering Stars.”
Everett is nominated for “James,” which reinterprets Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of its black protagonist, the slave Jim.
Everett was a finalist for the 2022 Booker Award with “The Trees.” Kushner, who was a finalist for the Booker Award in 2018 with her bestseller “The Mars Room,” is back in the running with the spy story “Creation Lake.” Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers, a finalist in both 2018 and 2021, is on the longlist with “Playground,” a story about money, power and climate change set on a Polynesian island.
The other US candidates are Rita Bullwinkel for “Headshot” and Canadian-American author Claire Messud for “This Strange Eventful History”.
Authors from Britain, Canada, Ireland, Australia and the Netherlands round out the list, which includes “Hero” by Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels, “My Friends” by British-Libyan author Hisham Matar and “The Safekeep” by Yael van der Wouden, the first Dutch Booker semi-finalist.
Artist and writer Edmund de Waal, who chairs the five-person jury, said the list included “books that explore what it means to belong, to be displaced and to return,” with settings ranging from a small Irish town to a monastery in Australia, and from the depths of the ocean to outer space.
Established in 1969, the Booker Prize has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers. It is open to novels from any country published in Britain and Ireland. Last year’s winner was Irish writer Paul Lynch for the post-democratic dystopia Prophet Song.
A list of six finalists will be announced on September 16 and this year’s winner will be announced at a ceremony in London on November 12.
Jill Lawless, The Associated Press
