Indian-origin author Sunjeev Sahota longlisted for Booker Prize 2021

Indian-origin author Sunjeev Sahota longlisted for Booker Prize 2021
on Jul 29, 2021

The Booker Prize has announced its prestigious longlist for 2021 and author Sunjeev Sahota, Rachel Cusk, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Patricia Lockwood are among those longlisted. A total of 13 authors have made it to the Booker dozen this year. Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize is one of the most prestigious annual awards which is given to novels written in the English language and published in the United Kingdom. The longlist for the 50,000-pound Booker Prize 2021 was announced on July 27. Historian Maya Jasanoff, Chair of Judges, said that the books longlisted for Booker Prize 2021 consider how people grapple with the past - whether personal experiences of grief or dislocation or the historical legacies of enslavement, apartheid, and civil war. Many examine intimate relationships placed under stress, and through them meditate on ideas of freedom and obligation, or on what makes us human... It's particularly resonant during the pandemic to note that all of these books have important things to say about the nature of community, from the tiny and secluded to the unmeasurable expanse of cyberspace, she said. Britain's Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017, is longlisted for Booker Prize 2021 for his new book 'Klara and the Sun'. The novel is about love and humanity which is narrated by a solar-powered android. It is noted that Ishiguro won the Booker Prize in 1989 for his book 'The Remains of the Day', while this is the fourth time he is nominated for the prestigious prize. American author Richard Powers won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his book 'The Overstory'; the book was also a Booker finalist that year. Powers is nominated this year for 'Bewilderment', which is about an astrobiologist and his neurodivergent son. Other previous Booker contenders on this year's list include South Africa's Damon Galgut for his story of racism and reckoning, 'The Promise'; Indian-origin British writer Sunjeev Sahota for 'China Room', which travels between England and India; and Canada's Mary Lawson for her tale of life in a northern town, 'A Town Called Solace', reports AP. This year's longlist also includes two debut novels by American authors Patricia Lockwood and Nathan Harris. While Patricia Lockwood is nominated for her social media-saturated story 'No One is Talking About This', Nathan Harris is nominated for 'The Sweetness of Water' which is set at the end of the Civil War in the United States. The list also includes 'Great Circle' by American writer Maggie Shipstead, British novelist Francis Spufford's 'Light Perpetual', British/Somali author Nadifa Mohamed's 'The Fortune Men', British/Canadian writer Rachel Cusk's 'Second Place', South African novelist Karen Jennings's 'An Island' and 'A Passage North' by Sri Lankan writer and DSC prize winner Anuk Arudpragasam, reports AP.A shortlist of six books will be announced September 14. The Booker Prize 2021 winner will be revealed on November 3 this year during a ceremony in London. Source - Times of india