Thubron, Phillips join Lola Young on 2017 Man Booker jury

The two will join Sarah Hall, Lila Azam Zanganeh and chair Baroness Young to judge the UK’s premier literary prize, to be awarded in October 2017. Travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron and artist Tom Phillips are to join the five-strong panel that will judge the 2017 Man Booker prize, it was announced on Tuesday. […]

The two will join Sarah Hall, Lila Azam Zanganeh and chair Baroness Young to judge the UK’s premier literary prize, to be awarded in October 2017.

Travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron and artist Tom Phillips are to join the five-strong panel that will judge the 2017 Man Booker prize, it was announced on Tuesday.

Both are Commanders of the British Empire, making this the most highly decorated Booker jury for many years. It will be chaired by the crossbench peer Baroness Lola Young.

Novelist Sarah Hall, who has twice been in the running for the prize, also joins the the panel alongside Lila Azam Zanganeh, a US-based literary critic of Iranian French background, whose first book, The Enchanter, was an unconventional homage to Nabokov.Thubron, whose novel To the Last City was longlisted for the prize in 2002, made a well-received return to fiction this year with Night of Fire. He has been president of the Royal Society of Literature since 2010.

Phillips – a polymath who has painted Iris Murdoch, collaborated with film-maker Peter Greenway on a TV series based on Dante’s Inferno and designed album covers for Brian Eno and King Crimson – made his literary name with collage works, beginning with his cult 1970 classic, A Humument.

It will be the 49th year of the Booker, which carries a prize of £50,000. It crowned its first US winner this year in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout – a second victory in two years for the independent publisher Oneworld Press, which took the 2015 prize with Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings.

The Man Booker dozen – traditionally a 13-book longlist – will be announced in July 2017, and the winner will be crowned in October.

Source: TheGuardian.com