LONDON: Celebrated South African novelist J.M. Coetzee and US Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout are among the contenders announced on Wednesday for Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction.

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 favour of less famous authors and first-time novelists.

Coetzee, who lives in Australia, is the early bookies’ favourite and will become the first triple Booker winner if he takes the prize. He won in 1983 with Life and Times of Michael K and in 1999 with Disgrace.

Strout won the fiction Pulitzer in 2009 for Olive Kitteridge, which was turned into a HBO mini-series starring Frances McDormand.

The list includes six British writers, five Americans and a Canadian, Madeleine Thien, for Do Not Say We Have Nothing.

Biographer Amanda Foreman, who chairs the five-member judging panel, said the books had “provoked intense discussion and, at times, passionate debate, challenging our expectations of what a novel is and can be”.

Six finalists will be announced on Sept 13 and the winner of the 50,000 pound ($65,000) prize will be named on Oct 25.

Published in Dawn, July 28th, 2016

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