Books - The Booker Prize

Containing the shortest book, the oldest author and the youngest author ever to be nominated, the longlist has been announced for this year's Booker Prize. Here's the list...

Press Release

The 13 books on this year’s longlist – The Booker Dozen’ [I see what they did there - Ed] – were chosen by the 2022 judging panel: cultural historian, writer and broadcaster Neil MacGregor (chair); academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari; historian Helen Castor; novelist and critic M John Harrison; and novelist, poet and professor Alain Mabanckou.

Their selection was made from 169 novels published between 1st October 2021 and 30th September 2022 and submitted to the prize by publishers. Coincidentally, this year’s longlist includes the first and

last book the judges read. The Booker Prize is open to works by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.

Neil MacGregor, chair of the 2022 judges, said, ‘Over the last seven months or so, we have read and discussed 169 works of fiction, all written in English, by authors and about subjects from all over the globe. 169 journeys to worlds conjured and created by the wielding of words alone. The skill with which writers shape and sustain those variously imagined worlds, and allow others to inhabit them, has been our main criterion in proposing this longlist of 13 books. Exceptionally well written and carefully crafted, in whatever genre, they seem to us to exploit and expand what the language can do. The list that we have selected offers story, fable and parable, fantasy, mystery, meditation and thriller. 

‘All 13 books, of course, reflect — and reflect on — the preoccupations of our planet over the last few years. Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the pandemic, they address how we imagine disease as a living enemy to be fought on a daily basis, questions of racial and gender injustice, and the fragility of the political order. But two larger, and no less topical, themes emerged, both strongly represented in the longlist. 

‘The first is the extent to which individual lives are shaped and determined by long historical processes. If Tolstoy and Jane Austen can stand as opposite poles of the novel, then it seems that in 2022, Tolstoy is in the ascendant. Whether in Sri Lanka or Ireland, the United States or Zimbabwe, long histories of conflict and injustice are major dynamics of plot. The second is the elusive nature of truth: not in the sense that we live in a post-truth world, but in demonstrating the persistence, energy and scepticism required to get as near as is possible to truth, and so to a proper understanding, whether of one particular person, or of a nation-destroying civil war. The extent to which we can trust the word, spoken or written, is in many of these books the real subject under examination. 

‘The task of whittling 169 down to 13 has been as enjoyable as it has been arduous. We, the five judges, bring such different approaches and experiences to our reading, that left to ourselves, we would probably have produced five very different lists. But we read these books as a group, disagreeing and discussing, comparing, reconsidering and re-reading, and together we reached a striking degree of consensus. These are thirteen books — challenging, stimulating, surprising, nourishing — that we recommend for close and enjoyable reading.’

Gaby Wood, Director of the Booker Prize Foundation, added, ‘The 2022 Booker judges come from very different corners of the reading world, yet from the moment they met they have revelled in each other’s opinions and delighted in each other’s company.

‘The result is a set of books that are sometimes serious but never sombre, whose authors engage you with their wit, even as you absorb their dramatic, painful or provocative subject matter. It’s in this playfulness, of form or tone, that this year’s fiction is at its best.’

The 2022 longlist of 13 novels, is:

NoViolet Bulawayo (Zimbabwean) - Glory (Chatto & Windus, Vintage, Penguin Random House)

This energetic and exhilarating joyride from NoViolet Bulawayo is the story of an uprising, told by a vivid chorus of animal voices that help us see our human world more clearly.

A long time ago, in a bountiful land not so far away, the animals lived quite happily. Then the colonisers arrived. After nearly a hundred years, a bloody War of Liberation brought new hope for the animals - along with a new leader: a charismatic horse who commanded the sun and ruled and ruled - and kept on ruling…

Glory tells the story of a country trapped in a cycle as old as time. And yet, as it unveils the myriad tricks required to uphold the illusion of absolute power, it reminds us that the glory of tyranny only lasts as long as its victims are willing to let it.

The judges said: ‘A fictional country of animals ruled by a tyrannical and absolute power is on the verge of liberation. The fiction becomes almost reality as we picture the parallel between this Animal Farm, Zimbabwe, and the fate of many African nations. An ingenious and brilliant political fable that bears witness to the surreal turns of history.’

Hernan Diaz (American) - Trust (Picador, Pan Macmillan)

A literary puzzle about money, power, and intimacy, Trust challenges the myths shrouding wealth, and the fictions that often pass for history.

He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top - but at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the centre of Bonds, a successful 1938 novel that all New York seems to have read. But there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Trust elegantly draws these competing narratives into conversation with each other - and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a provocative and propulsive novel that spans an entire century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

The judges said: ‘There is a dazzling intelligence behind this novel, which challenges us to rethink everything we know both about the institutions on which nations are built and the narratives by which stories are told. Sly, sophisticated, insistently questioning, Diaz writes with assurance, determined to rob us of every certainty.’

Percival Everett (American) - The Trees (Influx Press)

A violent history refuses to be buried in Percival Everett’s striking novel, which combines an unnerving murder mystery with a powerful condemnation of racism and police violence.

Something strange is afoot in Money, Mississippi. A series of brutal murders are eerily linked by the presence at each crime scene of a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till, a young black boy lynched in the same town 65 years before.

The investigating detectives soon discover that uncannily similar murders are taking place all over the country. As the bodies pile up, the detectives seek answers from a local root doctor, who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years…

The judges said, ‘Eerie, provocative, blackly comic Southern noir. A page-turner with a sharp, provocative edge, as it harks back to the real-life murder of the young Emmett Till, it has important things to say about race.’

Karen Joy Fowler (American) - Booth (Serpent's Tail, Profile Books)

Karen Joy Fowler’s epic novel about an ill-fated family of thespians, drinkers and dreamers, whose most infamous son is destined to commit a terrible and violent act.

Junius is the Booth patriarch. A celebrated Shakespearean actor who fled bigamy charges in England, he is both a mesmerising talent and a man of terrifying instability. As his children grow up in a remote farmstead in 1830s rural Baltimore, the country draws ever closer to the boiling point of civil war.

Of the six Booth siblings who survive to adulthood, each has their own dreams they must fight to realise - but it is Johnny who makes the shocking decision that will change the course of history.

The judges said, ‘What shapes us? And who gets to choose the stories we tell about our place in the world? With an eagle eye and a bone-dry wit, Fowler introduces the Booths, a 19th-century family forged by theatrical ambition and agonising grief within a household steeped in the racism and myth-making of the disunited States. As the novel unfolds, we know - and they don’t - that one day the ninth child, John Wilkes, will step forward with a gun in his hand to bring the narratives of dynasty and country decisively together.’

Alan Garner (British) - Treacle Walker (4th Estate, HarperCollins)

This latest fiction from a remarkable and enduring talent brilliantly illuminates an introspective young mind trying to make sense of the world around him.

Joe Coppock squints at the world with his lazy eye. He reads his comics, collects birds' eggs and treasures his marbles, particularly his prized dobbers. When Treacle Walker appears off the moor one day - a wanderer, a healer - an unlikely friendship is forged and the young boy is introduced to a world he could never have imagined.

In this playful, moving and evocative fable, set once again in his beloved Cheshire, the masterly Alan Garner delivers both a stunning fusion of myth and folklore and a profound exploration of the fluidity of time.

The judges said, ‘Garner bared to the bone in late style. This tiny book compresses all his themes – time, childhood, language, science and landscape entangled – into a single, calmly plaintive cry.’

Shehan Karunatilaka (Sri Lankan) - The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort of Books)

Shehan Karunatilaka’s rip-roaring epic is a searing, mordantly funny satire set amid the murderous mayhem of a Sri Lanka beset by civil war.

Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet queen, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time when scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long.

But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka.

The judges said, ‘Life after death in Sri Lanka: an afterlife noir, with nods to Dante and Buddha and yet unpretentious. Fizzes with energy, imagery and ideas against a broad, surreal vision of the Sri Lankan civil wars. Slyly, angrily comic.’

Claire Keegan (Irish) - Small Things Like These (Faber)

Claire Keegan’s tender tale of hope and quiet heroism is both a celebration of compassion and a stern rebuke of the sins committed in the name of religion.

It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him - and encounters the complicit silences of a small community controlled by the Church.

The judges said, ‘A story of quiet bravery, set in an Irish community in denial of its central secret. Beautiful, clear, economic writing and an elegant structure dense with moral themes.’

Graeme Macrae Burnet (British) - Case Study (Saraband)

Graeme Macrae Burnet offers a dazzlingly inventive - and often wickedly humorous - meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself.

‘I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger.’

London, 1965. An unworldly young woman believes that a charismatic psychotherapist, Collins Braithwaite, has driven her sister to suicide. Intent on confirming her suspicions, she assumes a false identity and presents herself to him as a client, recording her experiences in a series of notebooks. But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in which she can no longer be certain of anything. Even her own character…

The judges said, ‘A mystery story - or is it? - that takes us into the heart of the psychoanalytical consulting room. Or does it? Interleaving a biography of radical ‘60s ‘untherapist’ Collins Braithwaite with the notebooks of his patient ‘Rebecca’, a young woman seeking answers about the death of her sister, ‘GMB’ presents a forensic, elusive and mordantly funny text(s) layered with questions about authenticity and the self.’ 

Audrey Magee (Irish) - The Colony (Faber)

In Audrey Magee's lyrical and brooding fable, two outsiders visit a small island off the west coast of Ireland, with unforeseen and haunting consequences.

Mr Lloyd has decided to travel to the island by boat without engine - the authentic experience. Mr Masson will also soon be arriving for the summer. Both Englishman and Frenchman will strive to encapsulate the truth of this place - one in his paintings, the other with his faithful rendition of its speech, the language he hopes to preserve.

But the people who live on this rock - three miles wide and half a mile long - have their own views on what is being recorded, what is being taken and what is given in return. At the end of the summer, as the visitors head home, there will be a reckoning.

The judges said, ‘The summer of 1979. Sectarian murders claim victims across Ireland. An idyllic island fishing community off the west coast becomes the laboratory in which Magee dissects the gulf between what Ireland is and how the rest of the world wants to fantasise it.’

Maddie Mortimer (British) - Maps of our Spectacular Bodies (Picador, Pan Macmillan)

Under attack from within, Lia tries to keep the landscapes of her past, her present and her body separate. But time and bodies are porous, and unpredictable.

Something gleeful and malign is moving in Lia’s body. It shape-shifts down the banks of her canals, leaks through her tissue, nooks and nodes. It taps her trachea like the bones of a xylophone. It’s spreading.

Lia’s story is told, in part, by the very thing that’s killing her; a malevolent voice that wanders her systems, learning her from the inside-out. The novel moves between her past and her present as we come to understand the people that have shaped her life.

In turn, each of these take up their place in the battle raging within Lia’s body, at the centre of which dances the murderous narrator and a boy nicknamed ‘Red’ - the toxic chemo that is Lia’s last hope.

The judges said, ‘Deliriously inventive and viscerally moving, Mortimer’s debut is a patterned, protean narrative that astonishes and overwhelms. Lia is dying while she’s living, her past, present and future a glorious cacophony of voices, from the webs of words that bind her to her daughter, to the mutating cancer that is an inexorable part of her self.’

Leila Mottley (American) - Nightcrawling (Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing)

At once agonising and mesmerising, Nightcrawling presents a haunting vision of marginalised young people navigating the darkest corners of an adult world.

‘When there is no choice, all you have left to do is walk.’

Determined to survive in a world that refuses to protect her, a 17-year-old girl finds herself walking the mean streets of Oakland after dark. When she is picked up by the police, the gruesome deal they offer in exchange for her freedom lands her at the centre of a media storm - and facing a terrible choice.

If she agrees to testify, she could help expose the corruption of a police department. But honesty comes at a price - one that could leave her family vulnerable to retaliation, and endanger everyone she loves.

The judges said, ‘Nightcrawling is a dazzling and electrifying novel set in the streets of Oakland, where the protagonist Kiera will face the failure of the justice system that oppresses young black women. A spellbinding story and a Catcher in the Rye for a new generation.’

Selby Wynn Schwartz (American) - After Sappho (Galley Beggar Press)

A joyous reimagining of the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers from the past, as they battle for control over their lives, for liberation and for justice.

Told in a series of cascading vignettes, featuring a multitude of voices, After Sappho hails the female torchbearers of the late 19th and early 20th century.

WHAT did we want? To begin with, we wanted what half the population had got by just being born.

Sarah Bernhardt - Colette - Eleanora Duse - Lina Poletti - Josephine Baker - Virginia Woolf… these are just a few of the women sharing the pages of a novel as fierce as it is luminous. Lush and poetic, furious and funny - in After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz has created a work that celebrates the women and trailblazers of the past - and also offers hope for our present, and our futures.

The judges said, ‘A poetic patchwork of fragments of literary history that together take shape as an intergenerational tale of the Lesbian family. An ancestry eruditely, playfully recovered.’

Elizabeth Strout (American) - Oh William! (Viking, Penguin General, Penguin Random House)

Bestselling author Elizabeth Strout returns to her beloved heroine Lucy Barton in a luminous novel about love, loss, and the family secrets that can erupt and bewilder us at any time.

Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband - and longtime, on-again/off-again friend and confidante.

Recalling their college years, the birth of their daughters, the painful dissolution of their marriage, and the lives they built with other people, Strout weaves a portrait, stunning in its subtlety, of a tender, complex, decades-long partnership.

The judges said, ‘No-one writes interior life as Strout does. This is meticulous observed writing, full of probing psychological insight. Lucy Barton is one of literature’s immortal characters – brittle, damaged, unravelling, vulnerable and most of all, ordinary, like us all.’

Four novelists in the above list have been recognised by the prize before: 

NoViolet Bulawayo (shortlisted in 2013 for her debut novel We Need New Names); 

Karen Joy Fowler (shortlisted in 2014 for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves); 

Graeme Macrae Burnet, who was born in Kilmarnock in Scotland and now lives in Glasgow (shortlisted in 2016 for His Bloody Project); 

and Elizabeth Strout (longlisted in 2016 for My Name Is Lucy Barton). 

Three of the others are debut novelists: 

20-year-old Leila Mottley, a former Oakland youth poet laureate and the youngest ever to be nominated; 

Maddie Mortimer with Maps of our Spectacular Bodies, which just won The Desmond Elliot Prize (for a debut novel); 

and Selby Wynn Schwartz, who was named a 2020 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Non-fiction. 

By contrast, Percival Everett has published more than 30 books and was awarded the Ivan Sandroff Lifetime Achievement Award at the National Book Critics Circle Awards 2021, and 87-year-old Alan Garner published his first book 62 years ago and is the oldest ever to be nominated, given that he will turn 88 on the day of the winner's ceremony. And the shortest? At 116 pages, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is the shortest book recognised in the prize’s history – the shortest ever to win, by the way, was Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald (1979) at 132 pages. This year, it's also good to see that the majority of the longlisted books come from independently-owned publishers: Bloomsbury, Faber, Galley Beggar Press, Influx Press, Profile Books, Saraband and Sort of Books. Faber has won the prize seven times before – the second highest number of wins for any publisher, just behind PRH imprint Jonathan Cape which has won eight times.

The shortlist of six books will be announced on Tuesday 6th September at an evening event at the Serpentine Pavilion in London. The shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. Then, on Saturday 15th October, just ahead of the winner announcement, the shortlisted authors will be appearing at The Times & The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival. The Booker Prize shortlist event will be chaired by director of the Booker Prize Foundation, Gaby Wood.

The 2022 winner will be announced on Monday 17th October in an award ceremony held at the Roundhouse and fully in person for the first time since 2019. The winner receives £50,000 and can expect international recognition and a dramatic increase in global book sales. The first public event with the Booker Prize 2022 winner takes place on Thursday 20 October at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of London Literature Festival 2022, alongside 2021 winner Damon Galgut who will hand over the baton.

Images & info - Booker Prize