Anne Tyler, Marilynne Robinson up for Booker fiction prize

The award is chaired by Michael Wood and this year’s judges are Ellah Allfrey, John Burnside, Sam Leith and Frances Osborne. Lalami’s third novel, The Moor’s Account, made the list and has inspired something of a breakout year for the Moroccan-born California transplant.

“The Moor’s Account” has been named a New York Times Notable Book and one of the Wall Street Journal’s Top 10 Books of the Year, one of NPR’s Great Reads of 2014, and is on the list of Kirkus Best Fiction Books of the Year.

Iris Murdoch was the first Irish writer to win the prize in 1978 with The Sea, the Sea.In 1993 Roddy Doyle won for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

“The range of different performances and forms of these novels is incredible”.

The “longlist” of contenders for England’s Man Booker Prize was announced July 29. Three debut novelists are on the list: Bill Clegg, Chigozie Obioma and Anna Smaill. Marlon James, who lives in Minneapolis, is the first Jamaican-born author to be nominated for the prize. “All of them do something exciting with the language they have chosen to use”.

The shortlist will be announced on Tuesday September 15 and the victor will be announced on Tuesday October 13.

The prize was originally known as the Booker-McConnell Prize, after the company Booker-McConnell began to sponsor the event in 1968, commonly known thereafter as the Booker Prize.

Thirteen books in the longlist included Satin Island, written by British Tom McCarthy, British writer Andrew O’Hagan’s The Illuminations and Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways.

Some of the most well-known winning novels include Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi”, Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children ” and Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient”.

The guidelines of the prize modified in 2013 to open it to writers past Britain and the Commonwealth. Oh, and theres a £50,000 prize.

The shortlisted authors each receive pound 2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The BBC’s television adaptation and the theatre adaptations by the Royal Shakespeare Company of both novels have been widely praised. His A Brief History of Seven Killings tells the story of an attempted killing of Bob Marley.