Two Canadians nominated for Man Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction now has its 2016 longlist.

Levy was shortlisted in 2012 for Swimming Home, which had initially failed to find a publisher for being “too literary” for the marketplace.

Five UK authors have made the Man Booker Prize longlist of thirteen novels, with former double victor JM Coetzee also making a re-appearance.

Coetzee won the Booker Prize in 1983 with Life & Times of Michael K and then again with Disgrace in 1999, making him the first writer to win the prize twice.

“His Bloody Project” by Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet.

The book, released by a newcomer on the publishing scene, Contraband, features the teenager’s memoir, along with court transcripts, medical reports, police statements and newspaper articles.

“Lucy Barton” has been a staple of local bestseller lists. Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time hasn’t made the list and nor has Emma Donoghue’s new book The Wonder which was thought to be a strong contender following her Man Booker nomination in 2010 for Room and its subsequent Oscar nomination for screen adaptation.

First awarded in 1969, the Man Booker Prize is open to writers of any nationality, so long as their book was written in English and published in the UK. The range of books is broad and the quality extremely high.

Ms Foreman said a “Brexit Britain” atmosphere had seeped into Cornwall author Wyl Menmuir’s debut novel The Many. The writing is uniformly fresh, energetic and important.

Other novels on the longlist include Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout,” a novel that, as the Forward’s Adam Langer wrote, “is both a raucous satire and deadly serious meditation on what we do and don’t talk about when we talk about race in America”.

The British contingent has increased from three past year but fears that the Prize could become dominated by global authors remain.

Coetzee’s “The Schooldays of Jesus” and Strout’s “My Name is Lucy Barton” are among the best-known titles on a 13-book longlist that spurned big-name writers including Ian McEwan and Don DeLillo in favor of less famous authors and first-time novelists.

The shortlist will be announced in London on September ahead of the naming of the £50,000 ($A87,000) victor on 25 October. The victor of the prize, which is worth about $65,000, will be revealed on October 25 at a ceremony in London.