Author Anne Michaels pictured in Toronto, April 22, 2011.Fernando Morales/The Globe and Mail
Six American writers including Rachel Kushner, Percival Everett and Tommy Orange are among 13 semi-finalists announced Tuesday for the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction. Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels was also longlisted for her novel, Held.
Pulitzer Prize-winning Cheyenne and Arapaho author Orange is the first Native American Booker semi-finalist for the £50,000 ($88,900) award with his centuries-spanning saga Wandering Stars.
Everett is nominated for James, which reimagines Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of its main Black character, the enslaved man Jim.
Anne Michaels’ new novel, Held, skips through time and space while asking life’s Big Questions
U.S. writer Percival Everett holds his trophy after he was awarded with the Literary Award at the 38th American Film Festival Sept. 5, 2012, in Deauville, Normandy, France.Michel Spingler/The Associated Press
Everett was a finalist for the 2022 Booker for The Trees. Kushner, who was a Booker finalist in 2018 for her bestseller The Mars Room, is a contender again with spy story Creation Lake. Pulitzer-winner Richard Powers, a finalist in both 2018 and 2021, is on the longlist with Playground, a story of money, power and climate change set on a Polynesian island.
The other U.S. contenders are Rita Bullwinkel for Headshot, and Canadian-American writer Claire Messud for This Strange Eventful History.
Writers from Britain, Canada, Ireland, Australia and the Netherlands round out the list, which includes Held by Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels, My Friends by British-Libyan author Hisham Matar and The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, the first-ever Dutch Booker semi-finalist.
Artist and writer Edmund de Waal, who is chairing the five-member judging panel, said the list included “books that navigate what it means to belong, to be displaced and to return,” with settings ranging from a small Irish town to a convent in Australia and from deep oceans to outer space.
Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers and is open to novels from any country published in Britain and Ireland. Last year’s winner was Irish writer Paul Lynch for postdemocratic dystopia Prophet Song.
A list of six finalists will be announced on Sept. 16, and this year’s winner will be announced Nov. 12 at a ceremony in London.