The 2022 Booker Prize Longlist has been announced! Chosen from 169 novels, this year’s longlist is comprised of 13 novels that span the globe and the decades, and features the youngest and oldest authors ever to be recognized in the award’s history. The author of Nightcrawling, Leila Mottley is 20 years old and Alan Garner, author of Treacle Walker, is 87 years old. Other highlights of this year’s longlist include three debut novelists — Maddie Mortimer, Leila Mottley, and Selby Wynn Schwartz — and two new independent presses that seem to dominate this year’s selection, Influx Press and Sort of Books. And at 116 pages, Small Things Like These by Irish writer Clare Keegan is the shortest book listed in the prize’s history.
First awarded in 1969, the Booker Prize is open to writers of any nationality writing in English and published in the UK or Ireland. The winner of the prize will receive £50,000 and each shortlisted author will receive £2,500. The shortlist will be announced September 6th and the winner will be announced in a ceremony held in London on October 17th.
Chair of the judges, Neil MacGregor, writes of this year’s longlist, “169 journeys to worlds conjured and created by the wielding of words alone. The skill with which writers shape and sustain those variously imagined worlds, and allow others to inhabit them, has been our main criterion in proposing this longlist of 13 books. Exceptionally well written and carefully crafted, in whatever genre, they seem to us to exploit and expand what the language can do. The list that we have selected offers story, fable and parable, fantasy, mystery, meditation and thriller. ”