Booker Prize 2022: Two Irish novelists longlisted alongside youngest and oldest ever nominees

Two Irish novels are on this year’s Booker Prize longlist, which has just been announced. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These — at 116 pages, the shortest book recognised in the award’s history — and Audrey Magee’s The Colony, both published by Faber, join 11 other books in the running for the prestigious literary award, most of them from independent publishers.

Three debut novelists, Maddie Mortimer, Leila Mottley and Selby Wynn Schwartz, are joined in the line-up by the previously shortlisted trio of NoViolet Bulawayo, Karen Joy Fowler and Graeme Macrae Burnet, and by the previously longlisted Elizabeth Strout. The youngest and oldest authors ever to be longlisted also feature this year: 20-year-old Leila Mottley and the octogenarian Alan Garner, who will turn 88 the day the 2022 winner is announced.

The shortlist of six will be announced on September 6th, with each author receiving £2,500 and a bound edition of their book. The winner, who will receive £50,000, plus the expectation of international recognition and a dramatic increase in global book sales, will be announced on October 17th in London, at the first in-person awards ceremony since 2019.

“The list offers story, fable and parable, fantasy, mystery, meditation and thriller,” says Neil MacGregor, the cultural historian, writer and broadcaster who is chairing the judging panel. The other judges are the academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari, the historian Helen Castor, the novelist and critic M John Harrison, and the novelist, poet and professor Alain Mabanckou. They selected the longlist from 169 novels submitted by their publishers, which had to be written in English and published in Ireland or Britain between October 2021 and September 2022.

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MacGregor says the 13 “challenging, stimulating, surprising, nourishing” books “reflect — and reflect on — the preoccupations of our planet” in recent years: “how we imagine disease as a living enemy to be fought on a daily basis, questions of racial and gender injustice, and the fragility of the political order”. Two larger, and no less topical, themes also emerged in the longlist, he says: “the extent to which individual lives are shaped and determined by long historical processes. If Tolstoy and Jane Austen can stand as opposite poles of the novel, then it seems that, in 2022, Tolstoy is in the ascendant. Whether in Sri Lanka or Ireland, the United States or Zimbabwe, long histories of conflict and injustice are major dynamics of plot.”

The judges describe Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These as a story of “quiet bravery, set in an Irish community in denial of its central secret”, with “beautiful, clear, economic writing and an elegant structure dense with moral themes.” In the Irish Times review Sarah Gilmartin said it “brings a fresh and sensitive perspective to an awful period in our collective history. Detailed, insightful and written with striking economy of language, it gets the reader remarkably close to the experience of the character.”

From Co Wicklow, Keegan has won numerous awards and been translated into more than 20 languages. Antarctica, her acclaimed first volume of short stories, was published in 1999, followed by Walk the Blue Fields (2007) and her “long short story” Foster, which won the 2009 Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award, is now a Leaving Cert text, and was adapted for film as the acclaimed An Cailín Ciúin in May 2022. She holds the Briena Staunton visiting writer fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

The Colony is Audrey Magee’s second novel, a lyrical and brooding fable in which two outsiders visit a small island off the west coast, with unforeseen and haunting consequences. A journalist for 12 years, including with The Irish Times, she lives and works in Wicklow. Her first novel, The Undertaking, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, France’s Prix du Premier Roman and the Irish Book Awards, and was nominated for the Dublin Literary Award and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It has been translated into 10 languages and is being adapted for film. The judges observe of The Colony: “The summer of 1979. Sectarian murders claim victims across Ireland. An idyllic island fishing community off the west coast becomes the laboratory in which Magee dissects the gulf between what Ireland is and how the rest of the world wants to fantasise it.”

In the Irish Times review of The Colony, Gilmartin commended it as “full of learning, from the Penal Laws, which contributed hugely to the decline of the Irish language, to the swift and brutal acceleration of violence by both sides in the Troubles” and for its detailing of island life and “subtle insights” that “keep the novel buoyant and suit the spare, unshowy style of Magee’s prose”.

First awarded in 1969, the Booker is regarded as the leading prize for literary fiction written in English. Former winners include Iris Murdoch, Salman Rushdie, VS Naipaul and Hilary Mantel. The 2021 prize went to Damon Galgut for The Promise, which sold 1,925% more copies in the UK in the fortnight after its win than it had in the previous two weeks.

Booker Prize 2022: The longlist

NoViolet Bulawayo — Glory (Chatto & Windus, Vintage, Penguin Random House)

Hernan Diaz — Trust (Picador, Pan Macmillan)

Percival Everett — The Trees (Influx Press)

Karen Joy Fowler — Booth (Serpent’s Tail, Profile Books)

Alan Garner — Treacle Walker (4th Estate, HarperCollins)

Shehan Karunatilaka — The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort of Books)

Claire Keegan — Small Things Like These (Faber)

Graeme Macrae Burnet — Case Study (Saraband)

Audrey Magee — The Colony (Faber)

Maddie Mortimer — Maps of our Spectacular Bodies (Picador, Pan Macmillan)

Leila Mottley — Nightcrawling (Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing)

Selby Wynn Schwartz — After Sappho (Galley Beggar Press)

Elizabeth Strout — Oh William! (Viking, Penguin General, Penguin Random House)