Man Booker Prize 2016 Longlist Announced, Including Four Debut Novels

This year’s Man Booker longlist, or the ‘Man Booker Dozen,’ has been announced, featuring thirteen titles from authors around the world with books originally written in English and published in the U.K. between Oct. 1, 2015 and Sept. 30, 2016. Five of those listed were written by American authors and six of them by British writers. Six of the books were written by women and seven by men.

The £50,000 Man Booker Prize for fiction writing has been awarded since 1969. This year’s longlist was selected by 2016 judges’ chair Amanda Foreman, Jon Day, Abdulrazak Gurnah, David Harsent and Olivia Williams. The thirteen books were picked from a pool of 155 submissions.

Authors represented include Deborah Levy, A.L. Kennedy, Elizabeth Strout and Nobel prize-winner J.M. Coetzee, who is a two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize. The list also includes four debut novels from David Means, Wyl Menmuir, Ottessa Moshfegh and Virginia Reeves.

Foreman said of the selections:

This is a very exciting year. The range of books is broad and the quality extremely high. Each novel provoked intense discussion and, at times, passionate debate, challenging our expectations of what a novel is and can be … From the historical to the contemporary, the satirical to the polemical, the novels in this list come from both established writers and new voices. The writing is uniformly fresh, energetic and important. It is a longlist to be relished.

A shortlist, with six of the books, will be announced on Sept. 13 during a press conference at the London offices of prize sponsors Man Group. The shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The winner of the 2016 prize will be announced on Oct. 25 in London’s Guildhall, which will be broadcast by the BBC.

Find the books that made it to this year’s longlist below.

Paul Beatty (US) – The Sellout (Oneworld)
J.M. Coetzee (South African-Australian) – The Schooldays of Jesus (Harvill Secker)
A.L. Kennedy (UK) – Serious Sweet (Jonathan Cape)
Deborah Levy (UK) – Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton)
Graeme Macrae Burnet (UK) – His Bloody Project (Contraband)
Ian McGuire (UK) – The North Water (Scribner UK)
David Means (US) – Hystopia (Faber & Faber)
Wyl Menmuir (UK) – The Many (Salt)
Ottessa Moshfegh (US) – Eileen (Jonathan Cape)
Virginia Reeves (US) – Work Like Any Other (Scribner UK)
Elizabeth Strout (US) – My Name Is Lucy Barton (Viking)
David Szalay (Canada-UK) – All That Man Is (Jonathan Cape)
Madeleine Thien (Canada) – Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Granta Books)