2021 Booker Prize Shortlist Announcement Livestream

hello and welcome i'm rebecca jones the bbc's arts correspondent and your host for today's 2021 booker prize shortlist announcement we're coming to you live from a number of locations around the world including here on the south bank in london and today we're announcing which six books have made it on to this year's 2021 booker prize shortlist in a moment i'll pass you over to the director of the booker prize foundation gabby wood to introduce this year's judging panel but don't forget we'd love to hear from you and i wanted to remind you that you can use the comments or chat function on facebook and youtube whichever you're using to tune in you can use this to put your questions and reactions to the shortlist to this year's judges who will be joining us live in a moment but before then it's over to you gabby thank you rebecca hello everyone i'm delighted to introduce you live for the first time to the 2021 book of prize judges rowan williams chigozia obioma natasha mcelhone horatio harrod and their chair maya jasonov it has been an incredible pleasure to watch them arrive at this shortlist after many months of shared reading and eloquent discussion in what has otherwise been a largely solitary time those of you who don't get to witness their meetings might imagine a booker panel to be composed of pundits emphatically proclaiming their views in fact it's less performative than that five people of disparate backgrounds show each other what they see in a story what dazzled them or challenged them what touched them or left them unmoved in their process they show something of themselves and come to trust each other as a result this year's panel did all of that with generosity and candor and proved i think that the best literature is elastic both because so many different things can be seen in it and because as one of the judges said the best of fiction can make you feel as though your mind or heart are a little bit larger for having read it now before maya tells you which books are on the shortlist i'd like to say something about the long list this year's was especially wide-ranging it's a shame to have to reduce that group of 13 at all and in some ways we don't have to last week we launched a new website at thebookerprizes.com and on it long listies shortlistings and winners are treated equally we tell you which is which of course but all of them have earned their place on a shelf in the booker library a place where i hope you'll spend a good deal of time some of the greatest writers of the past century have been nominated for the booker and not one doris lessing muriel spark william trevor to name a few they are all part of the book of pantheon nonetheless and this year's longest days are among them without diminishment still there is a shortlist for that announcement maya over to you thank you gabby well it's fair to say that this has been a year for reading unlike any other when we started the process around christmas the us and the uk which is where all five of the judges uh are located were both locked down and this invested our reading with a remarkable sense of intensity and focus it also infused our meetings with a special sense of connection we had each been absorbed in our own little isolated bubbles in this unique process and then we got to see the only other four people in the world who had experienced exactly the same thing from horatio natasha chigozier and rowan i learned how better to describe and articulate what it is that i found in books i learned from their responses to see things that i hadn't and together as a group we elaborated upon the incredible range of things that fiction can accomplish people often ask what are the judges looking for to which i respond what do the books have to show us the challenge as well as the reward of reading for the booker prize is to open every novel with the knowledge that this could be the winner to open every book ready to encounter a fresh perspective universe and voice and what a set of books we've read we read 158 books together between january and june which works out to be basically one book every day and it's tempting to use this reading experience as an occasion to reflect on the state of literature today are we seeing a surge in a particular form such as historical fiction are we seeing a notable preoccupation with particular themes of the sort one might find for instance in speculative fiction is there an emerging narrative style in the manner of say auto fiction well all of these in fact are represented on the long list that we shared with you in july and each of these modes seems apt in its own way for a present moment which seems to generate one thing after another that few of us could have expected in which the lines between reality and fiction can sometimes seem a little bit blurry we had a tremendous long list to work with and i want to reiterate that you can all see it permanently in place on the book or website that it represents such a range of styles settings and ideas as a testament first and foremost to the quality of the books that we had before us and a reflection too of the range of experiences and perspectives we each brought to the discussions so it's been very difficult to cut this down to six we now present to you however a short shortlist that is marked by a few key qualities it is immersive stories you can get absorbed in voices that get inside your head which feels reflective of the experience of reading in lockdown it is global in their authors their settings this feels transporting in a year in which so many of us has have been confined to home and it engages with matters of life and death which feels poignantly pertinent in the present catastrophic moment so here are the titles on the 2021 booker prize shortlist anuk a rude pragasim a passage north damon galgot the promise patricia lockwood no one is talking about this nadifa muhammad the fortune men richard powers bewilderment maggie shipstead great circle we're thrilled to share these titles with you and hope they'll spark as warm responses and as uh active discussions with you as they have with all of us thanks maya well what an exciting short list i'm sure you'll all have lots of questions and comments which we'll come to in a moment but in the meantime uh let's hear from the rest of the judging panel now about each one of the books it feels really good to be shortlisted for this year's prize it was good to get recognition for this book when i heard the news i guess i the immediate feeling was a relief excitement and a fair amount of anxiety it is the most surreal feeling and actually i can't believe that it happened while i was in london my heart felt very full so to have it happen actually here was very meaningful for me to be here reaching out to a much wider audience about this novel that's been so important to me that's taken almost 20 years of my life to to get out there it's something that you don't expect it feels as if i've been transported to one of the imaginary planets that i might have invented for bewilderment it's such an honor just to be included in this sort of tradition of books and to have great circle be brought to more readers i'm really thrilled and that is how the shortlisted authors reacted uh to the news that they've uh just received i was building up the anticipation we are now going to hear from the judging panel who is going to tell us about each of those books in a little bit more detail hi i'm marisha harrod i'm an editor at the financial times weekend and i'm so proud and pleased to present the first of our shortlist a nuke a rude progressive passage north this is his second novel and it's marked by a poetic sensibility and profound meticulous attentiveness to everyday experience what one of my fellow judges referred to as his poorestness but aaron prakasam isn't a miniaturist he's he's also writing more broadly about how we can live especially in the aftermath of trauma a trauma that can affect an individual or a nation so the story unfolds as our narrator sifts through memories of a failed love affair while also turning over in his mind the strange unexpected death of his grandmother's carer and this was a woman who'd been really her life had been undone uh by witnessing the violent deaths of her two sons who were casualties of sri lanka's long civil war the style of the book was unlike anything else we read over this nine months it's long looping paragraphs there's no dialogue and it builds up a kind of hypnotic momentum so we felt that he was taking on with great seriousness the question of how can we grasp the presence make sense of the present while also reckoning with the past and with history so i'm going to pass over to chicosia for the next of our titles hello my name is triga obiama i'm a fiction i'm a fiction writer uh yeah i i'm i'm very happy to introduce you to damon gargout's uh the promise uh gargood isn't a stranger to the book uprising i think needs no introduction uh he's been shortly said twice and uh this novel was actually one of the first that we read so we were immediately struck by what seemed at first like an odd narrative perspective which quickly crystallized into a wonderful uh an extremely penetrative point of view that is at once wholly transgressive uh as it is a reinvention i think of the standard omniscient narrative so the book is an expansive family novel that explores the interconnected relationships between members of one family through the sequential lens of multiple funerals i would say that we thought that you know the unusual narrative style balance is a kind of faulknerian exuberance with nabokovian precision and therefore pushes boundaries and it's a testament to the flourishing of the novel in the 21st century in whole gal good makes a strong unambiguous commentary on the history of south africa and of humanity itself and the novel can best be summed up in the question does true justice exist in this world if so what might that look like so this novel's way of tackling this question i think makes it an accomplishment and truly deserving of his place on the shortlist i will now pass it on to rowan to introduce to you patricia lockwood's novel no one is talking about this is a fur but patricia lockwood has already established a very firm reputation as a poet and a memoirist and her gifts in both those roles are very much in evidence in this book it's extremely funny it's poignant and it's very challenging the voice of the narrator is that of a social influencer a presence online and patricia lockwood uses that mayfly attention span of social media to tell a story which at first seems simply to be about the experience of writing on social media absurd comical outrageous but then halfway through the book there's a dramatic gear shift a family tragedy enters the life of the narrator real suffering real love and real loss appear on the scene without breaking her stride the narrator continues to write in the same style and yet that social media prattle is somehow enlarged extended deepened to try to cope with an experience it's really not designed for and the triumph of the book is that it evokes so full a range of emotional discovery or maturing within this apparently very unpromising medium it tells a deeply moving story with deep emotional truthfulness a story with its roots in the author's own experience and we're left wondering about the processes by which language any kind of human language is always expanding to cope with the expansiveness of changing human relations and changing human perceptions often at the very edge of extreme it's a book of unusual quality and we're all very delighted to present it as part of the shortlist but now i'll pass you back to maya maya jazanov and i'm here to tell you about the fortune men by nadifah muhammad so the fortune men takes us to a place that none of us had encountered on the page before and that is the docklands of 1950s cardiff jostling with somali welsh jewish jamaican and indian populations they're tossed together by the tides of empire which is in the contested process of dissolution and they're living in the shadows of the second world war the novel tells the story of mahmoud matan a somali seafarer wrongly accused of murder and it is based on a true story this figure allows muhammad to tell a story that is at once intensely local in the cardiff world but also very global as she takes us through the life story of matan looping from somaliland to tanzania from bombay to brazil it's full of complex and richly drawn characters who challenge expectations and it's also grippingly paced one of my fellow judges commented that perhaps from now on all noir ought to be set in cardiff but the novel manages to combine in a really brilliant way a kind of caustic social observation of historical realities with a deeply empathetic sensibility toward the characters and the communities in which they live and the fortune men i think demonstrates what historical fiction can achieve at its best to get inside the head of the past while implicitly yet urgently underscoring the present-day persistence of the issues that it takes on the issues of racism and injustice with that i'll pass to natasha for our next title hi my name is well clearly we were having a little bit of trouble there with natasha's audio i know she was going to be talking about uh richard powers book bewilderment the other uh book on the shortlist this year we also um need i think to perhaps are we able to hear from maya who was going to talk about maggie ships book the great circle meyer are you able to jump in at this point and just tell us about that book yes me again uh to talk to you about maggie shipstead's book the great circle um great circle it is a book that seems as if it should be launched into the world with the term epic attached to it this is a novel of tremendous narrative ambition and scale and it pulled us into its vividly created worlds right from the get-go it ranges from prohibition era montana to wartime britain to present-day hollywood shipstead has an extraordinary ability to conjure characters that are so fully realized one feels that one knows them marion graves a mid-century aviatrix whose ambition is to complete a great circle of the earth flying around the north pole and the south pole and jumping up into the 21st century hadley baxter a young actress assigned to play marion in a biopic and the whole book both the stories of these women and the many people with whom they intersect spills out in one gorgeously crafted sentence after another which makes it really absorbing in the manner of the great realist novels of the 19th century but at the same time speaking to ever-present concerns and questions about freedom and constraints in women's lives with that i'll hand it back over to rebecca or to natasha if her sound is up and running for the final title on our list lovely um maya um this is the beauty of live feeds isn't it you don't know what what sound problems what glitches you're going to encounter i think we're still trying to get through to natasha and adjust her sound so do bear with us because i'm sure you like me will want to hear what she has got to say about richard powers book bewilderment but in the meantime um thank you judges um let's hear from you uh while we see if we can re-establish some communication with natasha and we've already got some questions so i think i'm going to come to those now and oxford writer on youtube has asked you can't read a book properly in a day um after all you have told us you've been reading 158 do judges divide the books between them so maya a question for you about the judging process sure well we do not divide the books one of the features of the booker prize process is that every judge reads every book now it's true that reading a book a day can be a little bit overwhelming so another thing that we do is we read the books more than once we set aside some time in our judging process to leave a period between completing our first read through and coming up with our long list and from the time of deciding on the long list at the end of july until now we re-read all of the titles on the long list we will now dig back in for a third read of the titles on the short list before coming up with a winner so i think that this kind of replicates the process of whether or not a book stands the test of time that we're reading it at these different time scales and we're reading it over and over um and we are all reading it uh so that we can all come to the table with impressions when we uh have our meetings okay that's great maya and in fact that leads us on rather nicely to our next question which is from grace on youtube who wants to know and i think i'm going to ask you rowan if you don't mind are you enjoying being a judge because i can see that it it has its pleasures but it might have its drawbacks i have to say i've i've enormously enjoyed being a dodge certainly reading novels at this rate is his hard work no two ways about it and as maya has said it's not just a matter of skimming through you really have to form an opinion you have to shape up your reaction and be willing to discuss it and share it and test it on others but for me the most enjoyable part of the whole process has been the discussion um and i hope i speak for other judges when i say that i've found it a really illuminating thoroughly enriching experience we've we've disagreed we've got on fundamentally we've i think learned from each other and i've found it a colossally enriching really delightful experience and i'm hugely grateful to my colleagues and to the book of foundation for the opportunity of doing this um let's pick up with a question from gabriel caesar and horatio i'm going to ask you this question if i may gabriel wants to know what was the motivation for choosing both the long-listed and the shortlisted books was readability the goal or sheer great challenging writing or both or something else so i guess it's a question as much as anything about how you choose the book what's your criteria horatio what a great question um it's uh i guess our um criteria evolved as we read um i think that certainly ah sorry uh i think i just cut out that um the qualities that have been mentioned were certainly ones that we considered but each book we tried to consider on its own merits so every time as maya said every time we opened a book we had this sense that this could be the winner and that we would take it on its own terms and then thoroughly kind of analyze whether we think it kind of hit the notes that it was trying to hit so i guess the truth is we tried to take an open-minded approach and um we wanted things that challenged us of course um we we disagreed a lot we we had to convince each other and i know that my my criteria for what makes a great book you know when i came into the process um was probably quite specific you know i have certain touchstones or prices i think are are the greats but what was a wonderful thing is that this this experience of discussing the books um helped to reshape my ideas of what could make great literature and to appreciate some of the qualities that perhaps um i would normally not have been so so drawn to so it's a kind of baggy answer and i guess the answer is we try to keep an open mind and and um and look for the qualities that the these writers were trying to evoke with their with their with their work i fit back you may say it was baggy i thought it was rather brilliant and so that's terrific thank you for that i'm just going to pause your questions for a moment because maya if i may we're having difficulty getting uh back in touch with natasha so i wondered if you might be able to say a few words about richard powers book sure i'd be happy to and i'm here also going to ventriloquize natasha to the best of my uh to the best of my abilities because she did share her thoughts with us in the press release and of course in the judging discussions so richard powers book bewilderment which follows his pulitzer prize-winning novel the overstory uh tell us the story of theo who is a widowed astrobiologist and um astrobiology for those of you who are not instantly familiar with it is the process of basically looking for life on other planets and he is a widower thus single parenting a nine-year-old boy his son uh who is a non-neurotypical boy uh who's been sort of branded with the label of uh special needs so on a mission to help his son robin theo is prepared to engage with an experimental treatment which leads him into the realm of neuroscience which involves essentially trying to decode his son's mind in an effort to try to save him and it draws us into the close fraud but ultimately extremely tender and moving relationship between a grieving man and a vulnerable child theo is determined to protect robin from becoming a prisoner of bureaucracy and this is something of a high-wire act on its own and the account that powers gives us is beautiful as well as genuinely inspiring and that you know along with his willingness to venture beyond the known worlds into the cosmos because it features stories of the planets to which theo uh imaginatively transports robin and their storytelling together make bewilderment a clarion call for us to wake up and realize what our minds might be truly capable of if we were less obedient to the status quo let me just quickly reiterate my congratulations to all of the authors shortlisted today and urge you to go and read all of these books back to you rebecca maya thank you so much for that and let's go back to some of your questions we've got time just for a few more and olivia on facebook is picking up actually on what maya was talking about a little earlier about how many times the judges read the books and olivia wants to know did your view of the long-listed books change on a second reading and she goes i wonder what your thoughts are on that my colleagues have said earlier i i think that the the great thing about uh judging the booker prize is that you re-engage with these books and you know there are so in that way your reading is in some ways compartmentalized so there are certain things that appear on the shelf the first time and the second time you engage with the book that is gone you remove it or there are certain things that weren't there and you put those back so uh this is a a kind of uh uh a you know metaphorical way it is saying that yes uh we are constantly shifting our perspectives and our judgments and there are some books which uh you know we read very quickly so sometimes rapid reading obviously doesn't yield to to you know and a kind of a better understanding but then after we we read just 13 books instead of 158 books we read a bit more slowly and and gave it more consider judgment so yeah uh i think that to some extent our perspectives changed and uh the ones that that that didn't uh change very drastically or obviously changed in in a different direction which is why they're all back on the shot list she goes can i ask you a question sorry i'm not sure if this is in the rules but i mean as a writer and as a book a shortlisted writer i wonder do you feel or is it perhaps too early to say whether whether your writing has been influenced or changed even by having read all these different books well you know coming into these i i thought that uh you know uh gabby wood was trying to like you know uh destroy my brain by asking me to be one of the judges but you know uh i then i understood uh while reading the man what i thought i knew about uh what makes fiction work i actually may have been misinformed so this has been a very you know a learning process for me now i understand better what you know what what it means to to write uh what you know a great walk of fiction but also i now understand that you know uh being on the booker prize anything long list shot list it's a an extraordinary privilege that you know sometimes we might take for granted because you are going against like you know hundreds of extraordinary writers so uh it's a it's a humbling experience for me well that's interesting thank you for answering that and actually that leads us on beautifully to our next question which is from palace mahmoud on youtube um palace says in my view selecting the judges is as interesting as selecting the long list can i know the criteria and the process for choosing the judges i don't know if palash thinks that uh might might rather like to be a judge but gabby i think you need to ask us answer that question how do you choose the judges thank you well as as you heard from chicos the the main impetus is to make sure that writers careers are utterly destroyed no not at all i mean the i mean first of all it's not unilateral i mean i don't do it on my own that we have an advisory committee and there are trustees of the foundation and there's a lot that feeds in um but the main thing is actually you don't choose them one by one you choose people who will speak to each other in a particular way sometimes i think of two people i mean it's a little like fantasy football not 100 two people who will possibly change each other's minds um and i think the main thing really if you're thinking in that way is to imagine all the books that they might read as hypothetical and imagine putting together a panel on which every book stands the best chance of finding its ideal reader and then once you've done that once you've thought are you representing you know readers who are interested in all sorts of different fiction then you have to think about their personalities actually you know you have to think about whether they will get on with each other whether they're prepared to have their minds changed um and the alchemy of that can be yeah it is very interesting but it it can change it's very movable slightly rubik's cube like each year but very very enjoyable to think about and even more enjoyable to watch in action yes and i suppose perhaps more challenging this year because of course they haven't all been able to get together in the same room so much has been done remotely as so much of all our working lives although they've done brilliantly despite that you know and a little bit of quite a lot actually of last year's judges worked like that and uh well it's an enormous credit to them that they've done it so so generously so you know uh so compassionately so well and that they've been so friendly throughout yeah interesting gabby thank you for that and that is it for today thank you so much for your questions and for tuning in please go read all of the shortlisted books hopefully we've wetted your appetite and make sure you do get behind your favorite on social media the 2021 book of prize ceremony to celebrate the shortlist and announce this year's winner will take place live from the bbc's radio theatre on wednesday the 3rd of november and you can tune in on radio 4's front row programme or the bbc iplayer from 7 15 pm we look forward to seeing you there in the meantime it's just for me to say thank you for watching and being with us from all of us bye-bye you

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Length: 41min 30sec (2490 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021