Six American writers including Rachel Kushner, Percival Everett and Tommy Orange are among 13 semifinalists announced Tuesday for the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction.
Pulitzer Prize-winning Cheyenne and Arapaho author Orange is the first Native American Booker semifinalist for the 50,000 pound ($64,000) award with his centuries-spanning saga “Wandering Stars.”
Everett is nominated for “James,” which reimagines Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” from the point of view of its main Black character, the enslaved man Jim.
Everett was a finalist for the 2022 Booker for “The Trees.” Kushner, who was a Booker finalist in 2018 for her bestseller “The Mars Room,” is a contender again with spy story “Creation Lake.” Pulitzer-winner Richard Powers, a finalist in both 2018 and 2021, is on the longlist with “Playground,” a story of money, power and climate change set on a Polynesian island.
The other U.S. contenders are Rita Bullwinkel for “Headshot,” and Canadian-American writer Claire Messud for “This Strange Eventful History.”
Writers from the U.K., Canada, Ireland, Australia and the Netherlands round out the list, which includes “Held” by Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels, “My Friends” by British-Libyan author Hisham Matar and “The Safekeep” by Yael van der Wouden, the first-ever Dutch Booker semifinalist.
Artist and writer Edmund de Waal, who is chairing the five-member judging panel, said the list included “books that navigate what it means to belong, to be displaced and to return,” with settings ranging from a small Irish town to a convent in Australia and from deep oceans to outer space.
Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers and is open to novels from any country published in the U.K. and Ireland. Last year’s winner was Irish writer Paul Lynch for post-democratic dystopia “Prophet Song.”
A list of six finalists will be announced on Sept. 16, and this year’s winner will be announced Nov. 12 at a ceremony in London.