LONDON (AP) — Jamaican author Marlon James and Scotland’s Douglas Stuart have the chance to become two-time Booker Prize winners when the prestigious fiction award is handed out Monday in London.
Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout is also on a six-book shortlist — whittled down from 163 submitted novels — that judges called “moving, pacey, funny, violent, intriguing, horrifying and hopeful.”
James is the oddsmakers’ favorite to take the 50,000 pound
($67,000) prize with “The Disappearers,” about a group of gay men in a hostile 1980s Jamaica. Also favored is Stuart’s “ John of John,” a story of father-son secrets on a remote Scottish island.
A win by either one would make that author the fifth double Booker winner, after J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood. James won the Booker in 2015 for “A Brief History of Seven Killings” and Stuart took the prize in 2020 for “Shuggie Bain.”
Strout is on the shortlist with her story of a small-town New England teacher in crisis, “The Things We Never Say.” Her book “Oh William!” was a Booker finalist in 2022, and she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009 for “Olive Kitteridge.”
A panel of judges led by classicist Mary Beard is also considering three books by British authors: apocalyptic saga “The End of Everything” by M. John Harrison; Luke Kennard’s satirical campus novel “Black Bag”; and Rebecca Perry’s Medieval-to-modern tale “May We Feed the King.”
Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize is open to novels written in English from any country published in the U.K. and Ireland. It has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers.
Its winners have included Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Bernardine Evaristo and Arundhati Roy. Last year’s prize went to “Flesh” by Hungarian-British writer David Szalay.
