LONDON — Canadian authors Esi Edugyan, Patrick deWitt and Alison Pick are among the contenders for this year’s Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award.
Edugyan, who lives in Victoria, B.C., made the long list Tuesday for her second novel Half Blood Blues, which tells the story of a brilliant jazz musician who faces racial barriers in 1940s Paris.
Vancouver Island native deWitt, who now lives in the U.S., is a nominee for his second novel, The Sisters Brothers, a comical Western set amid the 1850s California gold rush.
Toronto-born Pick made the list for her second novel, Far To Go, which follows a secular Jewish Czech family in the months leading up to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Other authors on the long list, which has 13 contenders, include previous Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst for the century-sweeping saga The Stranger’s Child, and three-time finalist Julian Barnes for the memory-haunted The Sense of an Ending.
Six finalists will be announced Sept. 6 and the winner of the 50,000 pound ($82,000) prize will be named Oct. 18.