The 2023 Booker Prize shortlist has been announced, with Chetna Maroo the only British writer in the running for her novel Western Lane. The list is dominated by male authors for the first time in eight years, with four of the six places going to men.
Maroo’s Western Lane, the shortest book on the list at 161 pages, is described by the judges as a “mesmerising” novel about an 11-year-old girl, Gopi, whose world becomes the squash court in the aftermath of grief. The other shortlisted titles are Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, This Other Eden by Paul Harding, If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, and Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein. None of the six authors has been shortlisted for the prize before.
Murray’s The Bee Sting, a tragicomedy about an Irish family in crisis, is the longest novel on the list. The judging panel, chaired by Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan, called it “funny, sad and truthful”. Lynch’s Prophet Song, set in Dublin, is a dystopian warning about the “precarity of the democratic ideal”, while Bernstein’s Study for Obedience follows a young woman who becomes housekeeper for her brother in a remote northern country.
American author Harding, a Pulitzer Prize winner, drew on the true story of a racially integrated island off the coast of Maine for This Other Eden. Escoffery’s If I Survive You, his debut, is a collection of linked stories about a Jamaican family navigating racism and financial crisis in Miami.
The six finalists were selected from 13 longlisted titles chosen from 163 books published between 1 October 2022 and 30 September 2023. Responding to the male-heavy list, Edugyan said it was “the strength and the quality of the work that landed these writers” on the shortlist. The winner will be announced on 26 November.
