NOVELIST, POET and professor Alain Mabanckou has been named as one of the judges for the 2022 Booker Prize.
Mabanckou, nicknamed ‘the African Beckett’, grew up in Pointe-Noire, Republic of Congo, and studied law in Brazzaville and Paris.
His first novel was published in 1998, and since then he has published regularly, writing novels, essays, and poetry, and becoming one of the best-known novelists in France.
Announced today, Mabanckou was named alongside cultural historian, writer and broadcaster Neil MacGregor who will chair the panel and will be joined by academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari, historian Helen Castor and novelist and critic M John Harrison.
Mabanckou’s work has won many prizes, including the Renaudot Prize for Memoirs of a Porcupine in 2006, and his novel Broken Glass was ranked by the Guardian as one of the 100 best books of the 21st century.
He has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize twice: once in 2015, when the prize was for a body of work, and once in 2017 for a single novel, Black Moses.
In 2002 he became writer-in-residence at Ann Arbor, Michigan, before being hired in 2006 by the University of California at Los Angeles. He has translated works from English into French, including Beasts of No Nation by the Nigerian-American novelist Uzodinma Iweala (later adapted into a film by Cary Joji Fukunaga).
Gaby Wood, Literary Director of the Booker Prize Foundation, said: “It is perhaps a little easy to forget that both Booker Prizes are international.
“As we’ve seen in the submissions for the Booker Prize year after year, the English language has been hugely enriched by a global sensibility – whether it’s a winning London novelist influenced by a Māori author, a Turk writing in English under the star of James Baldwin or Scots dialect first published in New York.
“And the prize has a global impact: the shortlistees and winners are celebrated all over the world.
“This year’s panel is composed of superb readers who have an innate understanding of that global scope, yet are steeped in the history and literature of Britain.
“They are experts in the porous boundaries of genre, and in the exchange of literary traditions. I can’t wait to see what they recommend.”
The judging panel will be looking for the best work of long-form fiction, selected from entries published in the UK and Ireland between October 1, 2021 and September 30, 2022.
The ‘Booker Dozen’ of 12 or 13 books will be announced in July 2022 with the shortlist of six books to follow in September. The winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced in November 2022.
It’s not Much Ado About Nothing to Àsìkò, it’s more than that
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