2021 Booker Prize longlist announced
(Booker Prize/PA)
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro could win his second Booker Prize for fiction with his eighth novel, Klara And The Sun.
It features among 13 books on this year’s longlist, chosen from 158 novels published by writers of any nationality in the UK or Ireland.
The Japanese-born British novelist, 66, won the award in 1989 with The Remains Of The Day and has also been shortlisted three times previously – in 2005 for Never Let Me Go, in 2000 for When We Were Orphans, and in 1986 for An Artist Of The Floating World.
Klara And The Sun by Sir Kazuo Ishiguro (Booker Prize/PA)
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âMost of us had one or two favoured novels that really struck us, but we couldnât persuade the others, or sometimes there was a novel where we thought this was a really really good, thoroughly satisfying novel, but does it quite break the new ground or change the horizon in the way we hope a Booker winner would?â said Williams.
âWhen you think of whatâs won the Booker over the years, you want something that puts down a slightly fresh marker ⦠Thatâs not to say you look for novelty for its own sake. The other thing about a Booker winner is that it ought to be a book that people enjoy reading, call me old-fashioned if you like. You donât want something that is so experimental as to be highly satisfying to the author and a few ultra-sophisticated critics. You do want something that will keep people turning the pages.â
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This year s Booker longlist is so sensible it feels almost radical
For once, the judges have ignored experimental fiction and plumped for novels that are - shock, horror - a pleasure to read
27 July 2021 • 12:01am
Down to the last 13: (from l to r) Kazuo Ishiguro, Damon Galgut, Rachel Cusk, Maggie Shipstead and Nadifa Mohamed
Credit: Telegraph designers
Phew. The Booker longlist has been announced for 2021 and after years of technical trickery and an over-willingness to engage in identity politics, we have a longlist of 13 novels that is so sensible, it feels almost radical.
There are no graphic novels, no 200-page poems, no brain-scrambling first-person narratives. Instead, here is a longlist featuring several big hitters – Kazuo Ishiguro; Damon Galgut; Richard Powers; Rachel Cusk – that combines meaty contemporary issues with novels that are, whisper it, by and large a pleasure to read. Perhaps emboldened by the relief and approval that met last year’s winner, the