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American authors Elizabeth Strout and Percival Everett compete with writers from the UK, Ireland, Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka as finalists for the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction.
Strout’s symphony of everyday life “Oh William!” Everett’s powerful novel about racism and police violence, “The Tree,” won the £50,000 ($58,000) prize among the shortlist announced on Tuesday.
Other contenders include Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo, the bestiary “Glory”; Irish author Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like This”; and Sri Lanka’s Shehan Karunatilaka’s “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.”
British fantasy writer Alan Garner — the oldest of the Booker nominees at 87 — is on the “Syrup Walker” list.
Former British Museum director Neil McGregor, who chairs the jury, said several of the books were inspired by real events and “tell the long-standing history of cruelty and injustice in Sri Lanka and Ireland, Zimbabwe and the United States”.
“Set at a different time, in a different place, they’re all about events that happen anywhere in some way, and are relevant to all of us,” he said of the shortlist.
Established in 1969 and known for transforming writers’ careers, the Booker Prize was initially only open to British, Irish and Commonwealth writers.Eligibility expanded to all English-language fiction published in the UK in 2014
Last year’s winner was “The Promise” by Damon Galgut of South Africa.
The winner will be crowned at an awards ceremony in London on 17 October. (Associated Press)
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