The semifinalists for the Man Booker Prize, which annually awards fifty thousand pounds (approximately seventy-eight thousand dollars) to a novelist writing in English, were announced yesterday. Thirteen writers from Australia, Canada, Ireland, England, Scotland, and South Africa are included in the 2010 longlist, selected by judges Rosie Blau, Financial Times literary editor; writer and dancer Deborah Bull; former U.K. poet laureate Andrew Motion; Independent columnist Tom Sutcliffe; and biographer and book reviewer Frances Wilson.
The semifinalists, whose novels were all published in U.K. editions in 2010 are:
Peter Carey for Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)
Emma Donoghue for Room (Picador)
Helen Dunmore for The Betrayal (Fig Tree)
Damon Galgut for In a Strange Room (Atlantic Books)
Howard Jacobson for The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)
Andrea Levy for The Long Song
(Headline Review)
Tom McCarthy for C (Jonathan Cape)
David Mitchell for The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Sceptre)
Lisa Moore for February (House of Anansi Press)
Paul Murray for Skippy Dies (Hamish Hamilton)
Rose Tremain for Trespass (Chatto & Windus)
Christos Tsiolkas for The Slap (Tuskar Rock)
Alan Warner for The Stars in the Bright Sky
(Jonathan Cape)
The shortlist will be announced on September 7, and the winner will be named on October 12. More information about the longlisted books is available on the prize Web site.
In the video below, semifinalist Levy introduces and reads from The Long Song.