American authors Percival Everett and Rachel Kushner have been named among the six finalists for this year's Booker Prize for fiction. Announced on Monday, the shortlist includes five female authors, a historic first for the esteemed award. Everett, a Booker finalist for The Trees in 2022, is nominated again for James, which reimagines Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn through the perspective of Jim, a Black enslaved character. Kushner, also a former Booker finalist, returns with Creation Lake, a spy narrative.
The other contenders include Britain's Samantha Harvey with Orbital, Canada's Anne Michaels with Held, and Australia's Charlotte Wood for Stone Yard Devotional. Additionally, the Dutch author Yael van der Wouden earns a spot for her debut novel, The Safekeep, marking a milestone as the first Dutch finalist. This year's finalists for the prize, valued at 50,000 pounds ($64,000), tell stories ranging from World War I battlefields to the 19th-century American South and the International Space Station.
"Here is storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity. The fault lines of our times are here," remarked Edmund de Waal, chair of the five-member judging panel. "They are books that made us want to keep on reading, to ring up friends and tell them about them." The winner will be revealed on November 12 at a ceremony in London. Established in 1969, the Booker Prize honors exceptional fiction and welcomes novels from any country, as long as they are published in the UK and Ireland. (This story was generated by Newser's AI chatbot. Source: the AP)
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