Author Salman Rushdie’s latest novel Quichotte has been longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. The longlist, chosen from among 151 novels published in the United Kingdom or Ireland between October 2018 and September 2019, was announced on Wednesday.
The 13-book longlist also features Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Both Rushdie and Atwood have won the award in the past – Rushdie in 1981 for Midnight’s Children, and Atwood in 2000 for The Blind Assassin.
Quichotte, which is expected to be published on September 3, is billed as a “remake of Don Quixote with an epic love story set in the Age of Anything Can Happen”. The Testaments will be released on September 10. It is set 15 years after The Handmaid’s Tale, which was based in a dystopian future where a totalitarian state named Gilead had overthrown the United States government and held women in subjugation, controlling all aspects of their life, especially their reproductive rights.
The shortlist of six books will be announced on September 3. The six shortlisted authors will each receive £2,500 (approximately Rs 2.15 lakh) and a special bound edition of their book. The winner of the £50,000 (approximately Rs 43 lakh) prize for 2019 will be declared on October 14 in London’s Guildhall.
In 2018, author Anna Burns became the first author from Northern Ireland to win the Booker Prize for Fiction for her novel Milkman. In 2017, American writer George Saunders was named the winner for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo.
These are the works longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize:
- Margaret Atwood (Canada), The Testaments
- Kevin Barry (Ireland), Night Boat to Tangier
- Oyinkan Braithwaite (UK/Nigeria), My Sister, The Serial Killer
- Lucy Ellmann (USA/UK), Ducks, Newburyport
- Bernardine Evaristo (UK), Girl, Woman, Other
- John Lanchester (UK), The Wall
- Deborah Levy (UK), The Man Who Saw Everything
- Valeria Luiselli (Mexico/Italy), Lost Children Archive
- Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria), An Orchestra of Minorities
- Max Porter (UK), Lanny
- Salman Rushdie (UK/India), Quichotte
- Elif Shafak (UK/Turkey), 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
- Jeanette Winterson (UK), Frankissstein
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