The Booker Prize, formerly the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a prestigious literary award conferred each year for the best single work of sustained fiction written in the English language, which was published in the United Kingdom and/or Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives £50,000, as well as international publicity that usually leads to a significant sales boost. When the prize was created, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014, eligibility was widened to any English-language novel—a change that proved controversial.
The Country Girls is a trilogy by Irish author Edna O'Brien. It consists of three novels: The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). The trilogy was re-released in 1986 in a single volume with a revised ending to Girls in Their Married Bliss and addition of an epilogue. The Country Girls, both the trilogy and the novel, is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following World War II and was adapted into a 1983 film. All three novels were banned by the Irish censorship board and faced significant public disdain in Ireland.
José Eduardo Agualusa Alves da Cunha is an Angolan journalist and writer of Portuguese and Brazilian descent. He studied agronomy and silviculture in Lisbon, Portugal. Currently he resides in the Island of Mozambique, working as a writer and journalist. He also has been working to establish a public library on the island.
The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature was created in 1976 by the Irish American businessman Dan Rooney, owner and chairman of the NFL Pittsburgh Steelers franchise and former US Ambassador to Ireland. The prize is awarded to Irish writers aged under 40 who are published in Irish or English. Although often associated with individual books, it is intended to reward a body of work. Originally worth £750, the current value of the prize is €10,000.
Fugitive Pieces is a novel by the Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels. The story is divided into two sections. The first centers around Jakob Beer, a Polish Holocaust survivor, while the second involves a man named Ben, the son of two Holocaust survivors. It was first published in Canada in 1996 and was published in the United Kingdom the following year. The novel has won awards such as Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, Orange Prize for Fiction, Guardian Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize. It was on Canada's bestseller list for more than two years and has been translated into over 20 different languages.
The Stinging Fly is a literary magazine published in Ireland, featuring short stories, essays, and poetry. It publishes two issues each year. In 2005, The Stinging Fly moved into book publishing with the establishment of The Stinging Fly Press. The magazine has been described as "something of a revelation in Irish literature" by The New York Times.
Anna Burns FRSL is an author from Northern Ireland. Her novel Milkman won the 2018 Booker Prize, the 2019 Orwell Prize for political fiction, and the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award.
Anne Teresa Enright is an Irish writer. The first Laureate for Irish Fiction (2015–2018) and winner of the Man Booker Prize (2007), she has published eight novels, many short stories, and a non-fiction work called Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, about the birth of her two children. Her essays on literary themes have appeared in the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, and she writes for the books pages of The Irish Times and The Guardian. Her fiction explores themes such as family, love, identity and motherhood.
Kevin Barry is an Irish writer. He is the author of three collections of short stories and three novels. City of Bohane (2011) was the winner of the 2013 International Dublin Literary Award. Beatlebone (2015) won the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize and is one of seven books by Irish authors nominated for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award, the world's most valuable annual literary fiction prize for books published in English. His 2019 novel Night Boat to Tangier was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. Barry is also an editor of Winter Papers, an arts and culture annual.
Molly McCloskey is an American writer who lived in Ireland for many years. Her fiction has won the RTÉ Francis MacManus Award (1995) and the inaugural Fish Short Story Prize (1996). Her story "Another Country" was anthologized in The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories (2005), edited by David Marcus. In 2009, another of her short stories, "This Isn’t Heaven," was selected by Richard Ford as one of the prize-winning stories in the 2009 Davy Byrne’s Irish Writing Award and was anthologized in Davy Byrne’s Stories. Her first work of non-fiction, a memoir of her schizophrenic brother Mike, called Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother, was named by The Sunday Times (UK) as its Memoir of the Year for 2011.
The 2012 Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded on 16 October 2012. A longlist of twelve titles was announced on 25 July, and these were narrowed down to a shortlist of six titles, announced on 11 September. The jury was chaired by Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, accompanied by literary critics Dinah Birch and Bharat Tandon, historian and biographer Amanda Foreman, and Dan Stevens, actor of Downton Abbey fame with a background English Literature studies. The jury was faced with the controversy of the 2011 jury, whose approach had been seen as overly populist. Whether or not as a response to this, the 2012 jury strongly emphasised the value of literary quality and linguistic innovation as criteria for inclusion.
Marlon James is a Jamaican writer. He is the author of five novels: John Crow's Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), which won him the 2015 Man Booker Prize, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019), and Moon Witch, Spider King (2022).
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is the debut novel of Eimear McBride published in 2013.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2016.
The Sellout is a 2015 novel by Paul Beatty published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the UK by Oneworld Publications in 2016. The novel takes place in and around Los Angeles, California, and muses about the state of racial relations in the U.S. today. In October 2016, it won the Booker Prize, making Beatty the first US writer to win that award.
The Green Road is a 2015 novel by Irish author Anne Enright. It is the sixth novel by Enright and concerns the lives of the Madigan family - four children and their mother Rosaleen. A critical success, it was called "virtuosic" by Telegraph critic Anthony Cummins.
Milkman is a historical psychological fiction novel written by the Northern Irish author Anna Burns. Set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the story follows an 18-year-old girl, "middle sister," who is harassed by an older married man known as "the milkman" and then as "Milkman". It is Burns's first novel to be published after Little Constructions in 2007, and is her third overall.
The Long Take, or A Way to Lose More Slowly, known simply as The Long Take, is a novel in narrative poetry form with noir style by Scottish poet Robin Robertson. It was published in 2018 by Picador. The story-line is set in United States post World War II. Robertson received the Goldsmiths Prize, Walter Scott Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for this work.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a 2022 novel by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka and winner of the 2022 Booker Prize. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was published on 4 August 2022 by the small independent London publisher Sort of Books (ISBN 978-1908745903). An earlier version of the novel was originally published in the Indian subcontinent as Chats with the Dead in 2020.
