New Zealander Makes Booker Prize Longlist

New Zealand author Anna Smaill has been longlisted for the £50,000 Man Booker Prize with her debut novel The Chimes.

“Just dropped in to check my email before bed and … now can’t see sleep in my near future. Thank you all for loveliness. Bloody hell”, tweeted the Auckland-born, Wellington based author after hearing about the selection.

A panel of five judges – Michael Wood, Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, John Burnside, Sam Leith and Frances Osborne, selected 13 out of 156 books for the longlist.

“The range of different performances and forms of these novels is amazing. All of them do something exciting with the language they have chosen to use”, said Michael Wood, chair of this year’s judges.

The Chimes “is set in a reimagined London, a world where memory and words have been virtually erased (…) In the absence of memory and the written word is music; a vast musical instrument chimes daily, wiping thoughts of the past”.

The judges were struck by the international spectrum of the novels, with the longlist featuring three British writers, five US writers and one apiece from the Republic of Ireland, New Zealand, India, Nigeria and Jamaica.

In 2013 Eleanor Catton, another New Zealand author, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize with her novel The Luminaries.

Article Source: The Man Booker Prizes, July 29, 2015.

Image Source: Twitter – Anna Smaill