Three US novelists make Man Booker Prize shortlist

Three American writers — Paul Auster, Emily Fridlund and George Saunders — have made the cut for the 2017 Man Booker Prize shortlist announced on Wednesday.

The remaining three writers are British. Ali Smith and Mohsin Hamid, who holds dual nationality with Pakistan, have both been shortlisted for the UK’s best-known literary award before.

The two youngest writers on the six-strong list, Fiona Mozley and Ms Fridlund, are both debut novelists.

Lola Young, the crossbench peer and former academic chairing the panel of judges, described the shortlist as “six unique and intrepid books that collectively push against the borders of convention”.

The books cover a wide range of topics, from a family subsisting on the edge of society in Ms Mozley’s Elmet (JM Originals) and a girl charged with the care of a young boy in the wilds of Minnesota in Ms Fridlund’s History of Wolves (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), to the displacement felt by a nation in the direct aftermath of the Brexit vote in Ms Smith’s Autumn (Hamish Hamilton). It is the fourth occasion she has been shortlisted for the award.

Mr Hamid’s Exit West (Hamish Hamilton) explores the movement of people across the globe in search of freedom and a new life, while Mr Auster’s 4321 (Faber & Faber) imagines four different alternative lives for one person. Mr Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury Publishing) focuses on one night in the life of Abraham Lincoln, as he lays his deceased son to rest.

Mr Saunders is currently the bookmakers’ favourite for 2017.

The question on the lips of the British literary world has been whether the prize, established in 1969 and historically restricted to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, would become “Americanised”, since it was opened up to US writers in 2014. Paul Beatty triumphed last year with his satirical novel The Sellout, making him the first American to have won the prize.

Baroness Young was adamant to stress that, when judging the prize, “nationality is not an issue. Neither is gender or ethnicity or any of those things.”

Notable absences from the shortlist include Arundhati Roy whose book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , was her first since The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997. Zadie Smith was another literary giant on the longlist of 13 books — otherwise known as the Booker dozen — for her latest novel Swing Time .

The other judges are author and critic Lila Azam Zanganeh, novelist and previously shortlisted author Sarah Hall, artist Tom Phillips and travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron.

“Each book is speaking and addressing an issue of our time, [not] in a political fashion, but in a poetic, a literary, or aesthetic way,” said Ms Azam Zanganeh. “Each is looking through a different lens to address virtual reality, lives in the margins of society, the migrant crisis, or this new metaphysical strain in our culture. Taken together, it constitutes a beautiful mosaic of minds at work.”

The £50,000 prize will be announced at an awards ceremony in London on October 17.