Man Booker Prize: 2007 winner Anne Enright makes longlist

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Man Booker PrizeImage source, Man Booker
Image caption,

The winner of the Man Booker will be presented on 13 October

The 13 books longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize have been announced, with previous winner Anne Enright among those in contention.

The Irish author, who won the £50,000 prize in 2007, is longlisted for her sixth novel, The Green Road.

Three Britons - Tom McCarthy, Andrew O'Hagan and Sunjeev Sahota - make the longlist alongside five Americans.

Novelists from India, Jamaica, New Zealand and Nigeria round out this year's list of candidates.

A shortlist of six will be unveiled on 15 September, with the overall winner to be announced on 13 October.

Australian author Richard Flanagan won last year's prize for his wartime novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

The longlist of authors and titles is as follows:

  • Bill Clegg (US), Did You Ever Have a Family

  • Anne Enright (Ireland), The Green Road

  • Marlon James (Jamaica), A Brief History of Seven Killings

  • Laila Lalami (US), The Moor's Account

  • Tom McCarthy (UK), Satin Island

  • Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria), The Fishermen

  • Andrew O'Hagan (UK), The Illuminations

  • Marilynne Robinson (US), Lila

  • Anuradha Roy (India), Sleeping on Jupiter

  • Sunjeev Sahota (UK), The Year of the Runaways

  • Anna Smaill (New Zealand), The Chimes

  • Anne Tyler (US), A Spool of Blue Thread

  • Hanya Yanagihara (US), A Little Life

Clegg, Obioma and Smaill have all been longlisted for their debut novels, while McCarthy and O'Hagan have both been shortlisted before.

Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,

Enright is the only previous Booker winner to be longlisted this year

This year's prize continues the policy introduced last year of allowing all authors writing in English, regardless of nationality, to be considered for the award.

Before 2014, the prize - first presented in 1969 - was only open to authors from the UK and the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe.

Marlon James is the first Jamaican-born author to be nominated for the prize, while Laila Lalami is the first longlisted author to be born in Morocco.

Both writers are currently based in the US, the former in Minneapolis and the latter in Santa Monica.

Author and broadcaster Michael Wood, chair of this year's judges, said submissions were so "extraordinary... the longlist could have been twice as long".

"The range of different performances and forms of these novels is amazing," he continued. "All of them do something exciting with the language they have chosen to use."

Dublin-born Enright was considered an outsider when The Gathering, her fourth novel, won the 2007 prize, beating such titles as Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

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