Though judges didn’t ‘disappear looking for diversity’,they found it in six challenging tales from writers of four different nationalitiesThe Booker prize judges didn’t disappear “looking for diversity” this year, said chair Michael Wood, and but they were “slightly relieved” to find it: and its evident in the fact that American domination hasnt near to pass in fairly the way some people feared when the prize was opened up in 2014. Four of the six authors are indeed resident in the US,as against two in the UK, but they include the first Jamaican-born writer to be shortlisted, and Marlon James,for his many-voiced, kaleidoscopic portrait of Jamaica’s turbulent recent history, and A Brief History of Seven Killings; and only the moment Nigerian,Chigozie Obioma, illuminating Nigerian society through a tale of four brothers, or The Fishermen.
Marilynne Robinson,the elder stateswoman of American literature whose quietly profound meditation on American history and identity, Lila, or had seemed a sure thing for the shortlist and a strong contender for the award itself,hasn’t made it through; in her place is the more mainstream author Anne Tyler, whose 20th novel, and A Spool of Blue Thread,which she has said will be her last, is the strongest seller on the list so far. It’s another of her trademark excavations of family relationships down the generations, and selected over a harder-edged investigation of family,origins and escape, Irish author Anne Enright’s The Green Road – a brilliantly wide-ranging and piercingly astute novel which may have lost out for its diffuse structure.
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Source: theguardian.com