COUNTDOWN BEGINS FOR 2016 MAN BOOKER PRIZE

So far six contenders have been shortlisted ahead of Tuesday October 25 when the winner will be announced in Guildhall, London at a Black tie dinner.

The lucky six are Paul Beatty (The Sellout), Graeme Macrae Burnet (His Bloody Project), Ottessa Moshfegh (Eileen), Deborah Levy (Hot Milk), David Szalay (All that Man Is) and Madeleine Thien (Do Not Say We Have Nothing)?

They were chosen out of 155 novels submitted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.

it comprises three men and three women from three countries, two each from Britain (Burnet and Levy), the US (Moshfegh and Beatty), and Canada (Szalay and Thien . . . though Szalay, having been born in Canada but brought up in England is perhaps more British and Canadian).

Moshfegh’s parentage involves a Croatian mother and Iranian father while Levy was born in South Africa. Three of the books are historical (Burnet, Moshfegh and Thien) while the others have contemporary settings. Moshfegh and Levy have female protagonists, Burnet, Beatty and Szalay’s are male, while Thien’s novel deals with the history of a whole family.

“Beatty has written a dystopian satire about slavery while Szalay examines 21st-century man in all his aspects, good and bad; Levy’s tale dissects motherhood and mystery with an unsettling psychological intensity while Burnet lays out the mind of a killer in a courtroom drama; Moshfegh plays with female friendship and yearning while Thien looks at the effect on ordinary people of China’s topsy-turvy 20th century’’, the organisers have said.