The shortlist for the Booker Prize was announced Tuesday afternoon, with Elizabeth Strout and Percival Everett among the authors in contention for the prestigious U.K. fiction award.
Strout made the shortlist for Oh William!, her novel that revisits the character Lucy Barton. Strout was longlisted for the Booker in 2016 with the book that introduced readers to Lucy, My Name Is Lucy Barton.
Strout is joined on the list by another U.S. writer: Percival Everett, who was named a finalist for The Trees, which was previously a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.
Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo made the shortlist for her second novel, Glory, while Irish writer Claire Keegan was named a finalist for the novella Small Things Like These, which won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in July.
Also earning finalist spots were Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida and English novelist Alan Garner for Treacle Walker. Garner, 87, is the oldest author to make any Booker list.
The Booker Prize was established in 1969, and is given annually to “the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the U.K. and Ireland.” Previous winning books have included Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, and Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart.
The winner of the Booker Prize, which comes with a cash award of about $58,000, will be announced at a ceremony in London on Oct. 17.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
