The longlist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize was announced earlier this morning. Since the prestigious book competition is now open to all English-language novels published in the U.K., American authors now have a shot at the £50,000 ($78,200) prize.
Last year’s prize was the first to include English-language authors from outside the U.K. and Commonwealth, Zimbabwe and the Republic of Ireland. Two Americans made the shortlist, although the prize went to Australian author Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road To The Deep North.
There are five Americans on the 2015 longlist. They are Bill Clegg for Did You Ever Have A Family; Laila Lalami for The Moor’s Account; Marilynne Robinson for Lila; Anne Tyler for A Spool of Blue Thread; and Hanya Yanagihara for A Little Life.
The other books on the list are:
Anne Enright (Ireland) - The Green Road
Marlon James (Jamaica) - A Brief History of Seven Killings
Tom McCarthy (UK) - Satin Island
Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria) - The Fishermen
Andrew O’Hagan (UK) - The Illuminations
Anuradha Roy (India) - Sleeping on Jupiter
Sunjeev Sahota (UK) - The Year of the Runaways
Anna Smaill (New Zealand) - The Chimes
A winner will be announced on Oct. 13 at London’s Guildhall. The ceremony will be broadcast by the BBC.
“The range of different performances and forms of these novels is amazing. All of them do something exciting with the language they have chosen to use,” Michael Wood, the chair of the judges, said in a statement.