The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
ZIMBABWEAN author NoViolet Bulawayo has become the youngest author ever and the first black African woman to make the prestigious Booker Prize shortlist twice.
Bulawayo was last week nominated for her book Glory, joining Percival Everett for The Trees, Shehan Karunatilaka for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeidai, Claire Keegan for Small Things Like These, Alan Garner for Treacle Walker, and Elizabeth Strout for Oh William! In the running for the prestigious honour.
The Booker Prize for Fiction, worth £50 000, is a literary prize awarded annually for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the United Kingdom. Since it started in 1969, it has been won by four writers of African descent, Nadine Gordimer (1974), Ben Okri (1991), J. M. Coetzee (1999), Bernadine Evaristo (2019), and Damon Galgut (2021). Some of those who have been shortlisted are Chinua Achebe (1987), Abdulrazak Gumah (1994), Ahdaf Soueif (1999), Achmat Dangor (2004), Marie NDiaye (2013), Chigozie Obioma (2015 and 2019) as well as Tsitsi Dangarembga, Maaza Mengiste, and Brandon Taylor (2020).
The jury for 2022 is chaired by cultural historian, writer, and broadcaster Neil MacGregor alongside academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari; historian Helen Castor; novelist and critic M. John Harrison; and novelist, poet, and professor Alain Mabanckou.
All of the shortlisted authors receive £2 500 (nearly $2 900) and a specially bound edition of their book. The winner is to be announced October 17.
