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27 July 2016updated 28 Jul 2016 9:25am

The Man Booker Prize 2016: the longlist has been announced

Six women and four debut novels make the list on a year with a number of notable omissions and surprise inclusions.

By Hasan Chowdhury

The longlist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize has been announced today, with a number of surprises populating the line-up for the prestigious award.

To qualify for the prize, writers will have had a novel published in English between 1 October 2015 and 30 September 2016. The Man Booker has been awarded since 1969, with writers as varied as Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood among previous winners.

“The Man Booker dozen” lists 13 novels this year chosen by a panel of five judges from 155 submissions, with six women and seven men noted. Nobel Prize winner and two-time Man Booker Prize winner JM Coetzee headlines the list with his book The Schooldays of Jesus, while Deborah Levy, shortlisted in 2012 for Swimming Home, is picked for Hot Milk, her poignant take on the challenges and extremities of motherhood. Levy will be featured in this week’s magazine.

Also making it on the list are Paul Beatty with The Sellout – described by The Guardian as “a galvanising satire of post-racial America”, A.L. Kennedy, who has been selected for the first time with her eighth novel Serious Sweet and Elizabeth Strout, whose novel My Name is Lucy Barton has become a New York Times bestseller.

Included on the list are four debut novels: The Many by Wyl Menmuir, Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, Work Like Any Other by Virginia Reeves and Hystopia by David Means – an imagined retelling of the Cold War period which sees John F. Kennedy evading assassination while the Vietnam war rages on. Completing the list are Graeme Macrae Burnet, Ian McGuire, David Szalay and Madeline Thien.

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For many, the list brings along with it a number of notable omissions. Don DeLillo’s Zero K – a story offering chilling foresight into a future of immortality enabled by cryonics – was widely touted to make it onto the list. Jonathan Safran Froer too, was expected to make it on the list with his first novel in more than a decade – Here I am.

Previous winners and nominees who were picked as potential candidates to be longlisted are also missing. Ian McEwan’s new novel Nutshell, set to arrive in September, experiments with narration by telling a tale through the voice of an unborn child. Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time hasn’t made the list and nor has Emma Donoghue’s new book The Wonder which was thought to be a strong contender following her Man Booker nomination in 2010 for Room and its subsequent Oscar nomination for screen adaptation. In previous years, former prize winners will have been automatically submitted, making these absentees notable ones.

Meanwhile new novels from Zadie Smith and Ali Smith will be published just outside the competition’s timeframe, making them illegible for this year’s award. There are no Indian or Irish writers on this year’s list; the Man Booker Prize has nominated a number of writers from those countries in the past.

Last year’s award celebrated the work of Marlon James, the first Jamaican writer to win, with his third novel A Brief History of Seven Killingsan epic spanning the decades surrounding the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Jamaica in 1976. It’s an ambitious book whose pick by the Man Booker judges in 2015 highlighted the award’s desire to bring little-known novels with experimental flair and hard-hitting narratives to the centre of the literary arena. James’s win last year may reflect on this year’s choices; 11 of the 13 writers have never been on the list before.

The 13 books will be re-read by judges over the course of the next few months, with a shortlist being announced on 13 September, and an eventual winner decided by 25 October.

The chair of the judges Amanda Foreman said: “This is a very exciting year. The range of books is broad and the quality is extremely high. Each novel provoked intense discussion and, at times, passionate debate, challenging our expectations of what a novel is and can be. From the historical to the contemporary, the satirical to the polemical, the novels in this list come from both established writers and new voices. The writing is uniformly fresh, energetic and important. It is a longlist to be relished.”

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