The Booker Prize is the leading literary award in the English speaking world. It has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over 50 years. Awarded annually to the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.
The Long List or Bookers Dozen was announced on 28th July 2020. Each year’s panel of 5 judges is chosen with the advice of The Booker Prize Foundation Advisory Committee and is appointed by The Booker Prize Foundation. The judges read the submissions and are responsible for compiling a longlist of 12 or 13 books, and from this a shortlist of six books from which they then choose a winner.
The Booker Prize for Fiction is awarded annually to the author of the best (in the opinion of the judges) eligible work of long-form fiction. The work must be published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October of the year prior, and 30 September of the year of that award.
The 2020 longlist is:
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (Oneworld Publications)
This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Faber & Faber)
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)
Who They Was by Gabriel Krauze (4th Estate, HarperCollins)
The Mirror & The Light by Hilary Mantel (4th Estate, HarperCollins)
Apeirogon by Colum McCann (Bloomsbury Publishing)Â
The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste (Canongate Books)
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing)
Real Life by Brandon Taylor (Originals, Daunt Books Publishing)      Â
Redhead by The Side of The Road by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus, Vintage)
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Picador, Pan Macmillan)
Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward (Corsair, Little, Brown)
How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang (Virago, Little, Brown)Two-time Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel and US novelist Anne Tyler are up against eight debut novelists, including Kiley Reid and Avni Doshi, on this year's longlist for the £50,000 award.
Other debuts on the 13-strong longlist come from Gabriel Krauze, Diane Cook, Douglas Stuart, Brandon Taylor, Sophie Ward, C Pam Zhang,Tsitsi Dangarembga, Colum McCann and Maaza Mengiste.
Slough Libraries has copies of The Mirror & The Light by Hilary Mantel and Redhead by The Side of The Road by Anne Tyler but as many of the others shortlisted are debut novelists, we do not presently stock them but are in talks with our suppliers.
The longlist will be whittled down on 15/09/2020 to six books. Will Hilary Mantel, two time Booker Prize winner, do it again? Or will it be one of the debuts? The overall winner will ne named in November.
All four of our libraries – The Curve, Britwell, Cippenham and Langley – are now partially open for our new Click and Collect service and book returns. You just need your Library card and PIN number to use this new service and borrow books which our staff will select for you. For Click and Collect go to this link: https://slough.spydus.co.uk/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/MSGTRN/WPAC/HOME