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The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2018

Awards

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2018

MILKMAN by Anna Burns has been awarded the 2018 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. The novel concerns a bookish young woman growing up in a city rife with factions who is pressurized by an older, more powerful man with an unsettling sexual interest in her, and tormented by the vicious tongues of her neighbors. It is about the misuse of power and about the pernicious effects of gossip and rumor.

The moral framework of the novel, however, is not the main reason MILKMAN was chosen as the winner: it is because of Burns’ narrative voice, according to the chair of judges Kwame Anthony Appiah. “It is an amazing voice”, said Appiah. Burns “uses language in a way you haven’t heard before”. The central character is utterly distinctive: “You hear her voice in your head and you’ve never heard one like it before.” The book has few paragraphs and relishes the vernacular, so Appiah found himself reading it out loud (in private, he stressed, not least because “I have a very bad Irish accent”). While it might not look like a traditional novel on the page, it does replicate how the human voice works, and that is quite an achievement.

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction, first awarded in 1969, is open to writers of any nationality, writing in English and published in the UK and Ireland. This is the first year that novels published in Ireland are eligible for the prize, following a change in rules announced at the start of 2018 that recognised the special relationship between the UK and Irish publishing markets.

For more about The Man Booker Prize, go to http://www.themanbookerprize.com/
 


 

2018 Winner

 

  • MILKMAN by Anna Burns (UK, Faber & Faber)

 


 

2018 Shortlist

 

  • MILKMAN by Anna Burns (UK, Faber & Faber)
  • WASHINGTON BLACK by Esi Edugyan (Canada, Serpent’s Tail)
  • EVERYTHING UNDER by Daisy Johnson (UK, Jonathan Cape)
  • THE MARS ROOM by Rachel Kushner (US, Jonathan Cape)
  • THE OVERSTORY by Richard Powers (US, William Heinemann)
  • THE LONG TAKE by Robin Robertson (UK, Picador)

 


 

2018 Longlist

 

  • SNAP by Belinda Bauer (UK, Bantam Press)
  • MILKMAN by Anna Burns (UK, Faber & Faber)
  • SABRINA by Nick Drnaso (US, Granta Books)
  • WASHINGTON BLACK by Esi Edugyan (Canada, Serpent’s Tail)
  • IN OUR MAD AND FURIOUS CITY by Guy Gunaratne (UK, Tinder Press)
  • EVERYTHING UNDER by Daisy Johnson (UK, Jonathan Cape)
  • THE MARS ROOM by Rachel Kushner (US, Jonathan Cape)
  • THE WATER CURE by Sophie Mackintosh (UK, Hamish Hamilton)
  • WARLIGHT by Michael Ondaatje (Canada, Jonathan Cape)
  • THE OVERSTORY by Richard Powers (US, William Heinemann)
  • THE LONG TAKE by Robin Robertson (UK, Picador)
  • NORMAL PEOPLE by Sally Rooney (Ireland, Faber & Faber)
  • FROM A LOW AND QUIET SEA by Donal Ryan (Ireland, Doubleday Ireland)