The shortlist for the Booker Prize was revealed on Tuesday morning, and it’s dominated by debut novelists and writers who live in the U.S.
Authors named finalists for their first novels include Brandon Taylor for Real Life, Diane Cook for The New Wilderness, Avni Doshi for Burnt Sugar, and Douglas Stuart for Shuggie Bain. Stuart’s book is also a finalist for this year’s Kirkus Prize for fiction.
Rounding out the list are Tsitsi Dangarembga for This Mournable Body and Maaza Mengiste for The Shadow King.
The shortlist seems likely to cause dismay among some British observers who are unhappy that the prize was opened to American authors in 2014. Five of the six authors on the shortlist live and work in the U.S.; only Dangarembga, who lives in Harare, Zimbabwe, does not. The only U.K. author to make the list, Stuart, lives in New York.
Missing from the list is Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, the final book in her trilogy of historical novels about 16th-century British statesman Thomas Cromwell. That means Mantel won’t pull off a Booker hat trick—the first two books in the series, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, both won the prize.
The winner of the award, which comes with a $64,000 cash prize, will be announced at a virtual event on Nov. 17.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
