“There is something very 2020” about this year’s Booker Prize

There is something very 2020 about this year’s Booker Prize shortlist, is how the organisers summed it up a day after announcing the final 6 authors vying for the £50,000 award. The shortlist includes Zimbabwe’s Tsitsi Dangarembga and Ethiopia’s Maaza Mengiste.

On Tuesday 15 September, the Chair of The Booker Judges Margaret Busby, revealed  Diane Cook, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Avni Doshi, Maaza Mengiste, Douglas Stuart, as the six authors shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize for Fiction.

“As judges we read 162 books, many of them conveying important, sometimes uncannily similar and prescient messages. The best novels often prepare our societies for valuable conversations, and not just about the inequities and dilemmas of the world…the shortlist of six came together unexpectedly, voices and characters resonating with us all even when very different..” said Bubsy.

Other judges included: Lee Child, author; Sameer Rahim, author and critic; Lemn Sissay, writer and broadcaster; and Emily Wilson, classicist and translator.

Gaby Wood, Literary Director of the Booker Prize Foundation, adds: “Every year, judging the Booker Prize is an act of discovery… A book wins because of what it does.”

A blog on the Booker Prize  website goes one further: “There is something very 2020 about the shortlist, reflecting, as it does, diversity and the awareness that storytelling is perhaps more broad-based than ever before… Race, the environment, gender, sexuality. . . the writers and the judges have gone for some of the pressing issues of the contemporary moment,”

Fearlessness is also a characteristic of Dangarembga and Mengiste. The former was recently arrested in Zimbabwe for her role in protests against government corruption while the latter escaped the Ethiopian revolution at the age of four and now, alongside her literary activities, is deeply involved with human rights and immigration initiatives. Whatever else they may be, this group of writers hardly conforms to the idea of the fey creative spirit conjuring up fiction from an ivory tower. As the books themselves show, the authors are familiar first-hand with the nitty gritty of life and are no strangers to its unpleasantnesses, the blog states.

Maaza Mengiste was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A Fulbright Scholar and professor in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation programme at Queens College, she is the author of The Shadow King and Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, named one of the Guardian’s Ten Best Contemporary African Books. Her work can be found in the New Yorker, Granta, and the New York Times, among other publications. She lives in New York City.

Her book, The Shadow King casts light on the women soldiers written out of African and European history. It is a captivating exploration of female power, and what it means to be a woman at war.  

While in This Mournable Body Tsitsi Dangarembga channels the hope and potential of one young girl and a fledgling nation, leading the reader on a journey to discover where lives go after hope has departed.

Tsitsi is the author of two previous novels, including Nervous Conditions, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. She is also a filmmaker, playwright, and the director of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa Trust. She lives in Harare, Zimbabwe.

In 2019 the Booker Prize was jointly won by The Testaments by Margaret Atwood and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, who is of Nigerian descent.

The 2020 winner will be announced on 17 November.