Booker Prize 2015: Chigozie Obioma still in the race

Nigerian writer, Chigozie Obioma, has retained hopes of clinching the coveted Booker Prize with his debut novel, The Fishermen, having been shortlisted for the prize alongside five others. The shortlist was full of surprises as big-name American author Marilynne Robinson, who has won the Pulitzer, the Orange prize and a National Humanities Medal presented by […]

Nigerian writer, Chigozie Obioma, has retained hopes of clinching the coveted Booker Prize with his debut novel, The Fishermen, having been shortlisted for the prize alongside five others.
The shortlist was full of surprises as big-name American author Marilynne Robinson, who has won the Pulitzer, the Orange prize and a National Humanities Medal presented by Barack Obama, was eliminated from the competition, as was former Booker Prize winner Anne Enright.
Britain has a representation of two with Tom McCarthy and Sunjeev Sahota making the cut while award winning Andrew O’Hagan with his novel Illumination failed to convince the judges.
Despite Robinson not making the shortlist for her much talked-about novel, Lila, which had already won her the National Book Critics Award, two Americans still made the cut. Anne Tyler, the Pulitzer Prize winner, with her novel A Spool of Blue Thread and Hanya Yanagihara with A Little Life.
To complete the shortlist of six, the judges selected Jamaican author Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, a novel about gang violence in Jamaica and the attempted assassination of Bob Marley.
 The judges said McCarthy’s Satin Island “offers an elegant, desperate and funny account of what might be the world of tomorrow”, while James’s novel was “a vast fictional history” and “just exhilarating in its range of voices and registers”.
Yanagihara’s A Little Life was praised as “a work of lasting emotional impact, often larger than life itself”, and Tyler was praised for her “supreme powers of observation and stylistic brilliance”.
The Fishermen was hailed as “a captivating tale of the tragic unravelling of a family in modern-day Nigeria” by the judges, who also said of  Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways: “There are many reasons to run away, and they recur in Sunjeev Sahota’s amazing novel which borrows its title from them.”
Obioma’s The Fishermen, is about four brothers in 1990s Nigeria who skip school for a series of fishing trips, meeting a madman who tells them that the eldest will be killed by one of his brothers.
Africa’s other Booker Prize hopeful, Morocco’s Laila Lalami with her novel The Moor’s Account, didn’t make the cut as well as literary agent Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family, Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter and Anna Smaill’s The Chimes also missed out on a place on the shortlist.
Speaking on Tuesday while unveiling the shortlist, Chair of Judges,  Princeton English Professor, Michael Wood said, “Only on rare occasions does celebration come so closely aligned with regret. The regret of what we left out was tempered by the enormous excitement we have in presenting the six books on the shortlist. We re-read all 13 books on the longlist and in the process we rediscovered new pleasures in each. The writers on the shortlist present an extraordinary range of approaches to fiction. They come from very different cultures and are themselves at very different stages of their careers.”
Other members of the judging panel are Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, John Burnside, Sam Leith and Frances Osborne.
The winner of this year’s Man Booker prize will be announced on 13 October, joining a roster of major names including Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Margaret Atwood.
The shortlist
Satin Island by Tom McCarthy (UK) Jonathan Cape.
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James  (Jamaica) Oneworld.
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler (US) Chatto & Windus.
The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota  (UK) Picador.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara  (US) Picador.
The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria) One/Pushkin Press.