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Dear Reader,
A shot of extreme joy went through the circulatory system here at the Booker's headquarters today, when the 1994 shortlisted author Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He joins the ranks of writers who have been recognised by the Booker Prizes before going on to win the Nobel: William Golding, Nadine Gordimer, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, Doris Lessing, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro and Olga Tokarczuk.
Shortlisted for his novel Paradise, Abdulrazak was also longlisted in 2001 for By the Sea – and in 2016, the first year I worked with the Booker, he agreed to help others do the same and joined the panel of judges. It was a committed and convivial group, led by Amanda Foreman: their meetings lasted all day with a break for lunch, and Razak, as he is known to his friends and fellow readers, was always persuasive. Dignified, congenial, and a man of uncommon intellectual grace, he would come armed with an eloquent argument about each of the 150 or so books. I remember him saying, when comparing two novels, that one of them had him ‘worrying more about what it was up to’. This, in his view, was a good sign. In that way, in that first year, he and the other judges showed me that arriving at a winner of the Booker Prize could be less of a judgment than an open-minded investigation.
When news of Abdulrazak’s Nobel was announced, Nadifa Mohamed, one of this year’s Booker Prize shortlistees, revealed on Twitter that he had ‘helped me become a writer’. She wrote to him in 2007, saying she admired his work and asking if he would mentor her (‘Dear Abdulrazak, I am a young Somali writer and have recently been awarded an arts council grant…’). He replied with characteristic generosity – and the rest is literary history.
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In other Booker-related news, the 2014 shortlisted author Karen Joy Fowler was asked at a publishers’ event earlier this week whether she’d enjoyed writing her forthcoming novel, Booth. A deadpan pall came over her face as she confessed that she’d often wondered: ‘Wouldn’t it be easier just to fake my own death?’
Now she mentions it, many writers would no doubt feel the same: there’s a similar amount of ingenuity involved in writing a novel, and much more work. ‘I am so resentful of my characters,’ Fowler added. ‘They won’t do anything I don’t make up first.’
This week, we bring you tales from the fiction-writing front line. All six authors shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize share the aims and some of the travails that resulted in the books you must – surely – be reading now: A Passage North, The Promise, No One Is Talking About This, The Fortune Men, Bewilderment and Great Circle.
Enjoy this glimpse of the process as you read on – and see if you can place an early bet on a future Nobel winner.
Until soon,
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