If you thought the awe and adrenaline of awards season was locked up in an Oscar-shaped vault until next spring, think again. The Man Booker Prize 2018 longlist, which celebrates a selection of the year’s best novels published in Ireland and the UK, has landed, and we are excited to announce that three Irish authors have made the cut.
Trinity graduate and Mayo native Sally Rooney is tied for the youngest writer on this year’s longlist alongside Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under. Rooney’s longlisted novel, Normal People, is her second published novel. Her 2017 debut novel, Conversations With Friends, was easily one of my favourite books I read last year for its distinctive style and strong roots in contemporary life. The judging panel praises Normal People for its “compressed, composed, allusive” prose. “So much in it is shown and not told. Grounded in the everyday, it transforms what might have been a flimsy subject into something that demands a lot of the reader.”
Belfast-born Anna Burns is the only Northern Irish author on the longlist. Her novel Milkman explores Belfast in the 1990s through a protagonist named only as middle-sister. “At the intersection of class, race, gender and sexual violence,” the judges commend Milkman for dealing with “oppression and power with a Beckettian sense of humour, offering a wholly original take on Ireland in the time of the Troubles through the mind of a young girl”.
Donal Ryan returns as a longlisted author on this year’s list for From a Low and Quiet Sea. The novel follows three men and is set between war-torn Syria and rural Ireland. “A deft, unshowy novel about manhood and momentous contingency, it evokes the way in which real lives unfold and wrap around each other,” according to the judges. Ryan previously made it on the longlist with his first novel, The Spinning Heart, in 2013. The Spinning Heart was also adapted to a play performed multiple times in Dublin to great accolade.
With no women snagging the prize since 2013, the Man Booker has been living up to its name.
This year, seven of the 13 nominated novels are by women. Although it marks an increase on last year’s five, there’s little point in playing the numbers game at this stage: we’ll have to wait until October to see whether the ongoing streak of male winners will be broken. Crime novelist and judge on this year’s panel, Val McDermid, explained that when selecting the 2018 longlist, the judges “tried to read blind as much as [they] could. [They] didn’t care where the writers came from or whether it was their first book or their 40th.”
The six-title shortlist for this year’s Man Booker prize will be announced on September 20 before the winner is announced at a ceremony on October 16.
