One Indian author features at Man Booker Prize 2015 longlist

The longlist, or ‘Man Booker Dozen’, for the £50,000 Man Booker Prize is out, in which Indian author Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter is also on the list. This year’s longlist of 13 books was selected by a panel of five judges chaired by Michael Wood, and also comprising Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, John Burnside, Sam Leith and Frances Osborne. The judges considered 156 books for this year’s prize. This is the second year that the prize, first awarded in 1969, has been open to writers of any nationality, writing originally in English and published in the UK.

Previously, the prize was open only to authors from the UK & The Commonwealth, Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe. The 2015 longlist, or Man Booker ‘Dozen’, of 13 novels, is: Bill Clegg (US) – Did You Ever Have a Family (Jonathan Cape); Anne Enright (Ireland) – The Green Road (Jonathan Cape); Marlon James (Jamaica) – A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld Publications); Laila Lalami (US) – The Moor’s Account (Periscope, Garnet Publishing); Tom McCarthy (UK) – Satin Island (Jonathan Cape); Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria) – The Fishermen (ONE, Pushkin Press); Andrew O’Hagan (UK) – The Illuminations (Faber & Faber); Marilynne Robinson (US) – Lila (Virago); Anuradha Roy (India) – Sleeping on Jupiter (MacLehose Press, Quercus); Sunjeev Sahota (UK) – The Year of the Runaways (Picador); Anna Smaill (New Zealand) – The Chimes (Sceptre); Anne Tyler (US) – A Spool of Blue Thread (Chatto & Windus) and Hanya Yanagihara (US) – A Little Life (Picador).

The shortlist of six books will be announced on September 15 at a press conference at the London offices of Man Group, the prize’s sponsor while the 2015 winner will then be announced on October 13 in London’s Guildhall at a black-tie dinner that brings together the shortlisted authors and well-known figures from the literary world.