Booker Prize Longlist 2019: Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie among those nominated for literary award

Booker Prize winners Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood are contenders again for the coveted fiction trophy.

Rushdie, who won in 1981 for Midnight’s Children, makes the 13-book longlist for his latest novel, Quichotte. Inspired by Don Quixote, it is the story of an ageing travelling salesman who falls in love with a TV star and drives across America to win her hand.

Atwood won in 2000 for The Blind Assassin and is nominated for The Testaments, a follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale. This marks the sixth Booker nomination for the Canadian author and the first after her win. According to The Guardian , the contents of the sequel to Atwood’s dystopian classic, scheduled to release on 10 September, continue to remain a closely guarded secret with the 2019 judges saying in their statement, “Spoiler discretion and a ferocious non-disclosure agreement prevent any description of who, how, why and even where. So this: it’s terrifying and exhilarating.”

The eight women and five men on the list announced on 24 July include Britain’s Max Porter for Lanny; Nigerian-British writer Oyinkan Braithwaite for My Sister, the Serial Killer; British-Turkish author Elif Shafak for 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World; and Lucy Ellmann, the only American finalist, for Ducks, Newburyport.

Ellmann’s novel consists of a single sentence, a stream-of-consciousness written over a 1,000 pages. It involves, The Telegraph wrote , the interior monologue of an Ohio housewife ruminating on everything from dinner party menus to the dark side of Trump’s America. Her 4,26,100-word musings are broken only occasionally by a parallel story written from the perspective of a mountain lion.

Other nominees include Jeanette Winterson for Frankissstein, a reinterpretation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 Gothic novel and Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities which is loosely based on the Odyssey, the Guardian report added.

Founded in 1969, the £50,000 ($67,000) prize is open to English-language authors from around the world.

Six finalists will be announced on 3 September, with the winner revealed on 14 October.

Longlist for the Booker Prize 2019:

Margaret Atwood (Canada) – T_he Testaments (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)_

Kevin Barry (Ireland) – Night Boat to Tangier (Canongate Books)

Oyinkan Braithwaite (UK/Nigeria) –  My Sister, The Serial Killer (Atlantic Books)

Lucy Ellmann (USA/UK) –  Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press)

Bernardine Evaristo (UK) –  Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton)

John Lanchester (UK) – T_he Wall (Faber & Faber)_

Deborah Levy (UK) –  The Man Who Saw Everything (Hamish Hamilton)

Valeria Luiselli (Mexico/Italy) –  Lost Children Archive (4th Estate)

Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria) –  An Orchestra of Minorities (Little Brown)

Max Porter (UK) –  Lanny (Faber & Faber)

Salman Rushdie (UK/India) –  Quichotte (Jonathan Cape)

Elif Shafak (UK/Turkey) –  10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (Viking)

Jeanette Winterson (UK) –  Frankissstein (Jonathan Cape)

With inputs from The Associated Press