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UCD Library Collection Spotlight: The Man Booker Prize 2015
The Poster
Marlon James reading from the book
About the Prize
The prize, which celebrated its 45th anniversary in 2013 after launching in 1969, aims to promote the finest in fiction by rewarding the best novel of the year written in English and published in the United Kingdom. This is the second year that the prize has been open to writers of any nationality, writing originally in English and published in the UK. Previously, the prize was open only to authors from the UK & Commonwealth, Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe.To maintain the consistent excellence of the Man Booker Prize, judges are chosen from a wide range of disciplines, including critics, writers and academics, but also poets, politicians and actors, all with a passion for quality fiction.
The winner of the Man Booker Prize receives £50,000 and, like all the shortlisted authors, a cheque for £2,500 and a designer bound copy of their book. Fulfilling one of the objectives of the prize - to encourage the widest possible readership for the best in literary fiction - the winner and the shortlisted authors now enjoy a dramatic increase in book sales worldwide.
The winner of the Man Booker Prize 2014 was Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Previous winners of the Man Booker Prize can be viewed in Explore the Archive.
Resources for You
The Man Booker Prize 2015 website
Reading guides for the longlisted titles
Did You Ever Have A Family, Bill Clegg (Jonathan Cape)
The Green Road, Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James (Oneworld Publications)
The Moor’s Account, Laila Lalami (Periscope, Garnet Publishing)
Satin Island, Tom McCarthy (Jonathan Cape)
The Fishermen, Chigozie Obioma (ONE, Pushkin Press)
The Illuminations, Andrew O’Hagan (Faber & Faber)
Lila, Marilynne Robinson (Virago)
Sleeping on Jupiter, Anuradha Roy (MacLehose Press, Querus)
The Year of the Runaways, Sunjeev Shaota (Picador)
The Chimes, Anna Smaill (Sceptre)
A Spool of Thread, Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus)
A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara (Picador)
Man Booker Prize 2015: Marlon James wins for A Brief History of Seven Killings
Discover the Shortlist
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
Call Number: James Joyce Library General CollectionISBN: 9781780746357Publication Date: 2014The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma
Call Number: James Joyce Library General CollectionISBN: 9780957548855Publication Date: 2015In a Nigerian town in the mid 1990's, four brothers encounter a madman whose mystic prophecy of violence threatens the core of their close-knit family.
Told from the point of view of nine year old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, THE FISHERMEN is the Cain and Abel-esque story of an unforgettable childhood in 1990's Nigeria, in the small town of Akure. When their strict father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his extended absence to skip school and go fishing. At the ominous, forbidden nearby river, they meet a dangerous local madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he is destined to be killed by one of his siblings.
What happens next is an almost mythic event whose impact-both tragic and redemptive-will transcend the lives and imaginations of its characters and its readers. Dazzling and viscerally powerful, The Fishermen never leaves Akure but the story it tells has enormous universal appeal. Seen through the prism of one family's destiny, this is an essential novel about Africa with all of its contradictions-economic, political, and religious-and the epic beauty of its own culture.
With this bold debut, Chigozie Obioma emerges as one of the most original new voices of modern African literature, echoing its older generation's masterful storytelling with a contemporary fearlessness and purpose.Satin Island by Tom McCarthy
Call Number: James Joyce Library General CollectionISBN: 9780224090193Publication Date: 2015Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize
From the author of Remainder and C (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize), and a winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, comes Satin Island, an unnerving novel that promises to give us the first and last word on the world—modern, postmodern, whatever world you think you are living in.
U., a “corporate anthropologist,” is tasked with writing the Great Report, an all-encompassing ethnographic document that would sum up our era. Yet at every turn, he feels himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in buffer zones, wandering through crowds of apparitions, willing them to coalesce into symbols that can be translated into some kind of account that makes sense. As he begins to wonder if the Great Report might remain a shapeless, oozing plasma, his senses are startled awake by a dream of an apocalyptic cityscape.
In Satin Island, Tom McCarthy captures—as only he can—the way we experience our world, our efforts to find meaning (or just to stay awake) and discern the narratives we think of as our lives.The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota
Call Number: James Joyce Library General CollectionISBN: 1447241649Publication Date: 2015The Year of the Runaways tells of the bold dreams and daily struggles of an unlikely family thrown together by circumstance. Thirteen young men live in a house in Sheffield, each in flight from India and in desperate search of a new life. Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his past in Bihar; and Avtar has a secret that binds him to protect the choatic Randeep. Randeep, in turn, has a visa-wife in a flat on the other side of town: a clever, devout woman whose cupboards are full of her husband's clothes, in case the immigration men surprise her with a call. Sweeping between India and England, and between childhood and the present day, this generous, unforgettable novel is - as with Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance - a story of dignity in the face of adversity and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit.A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler
Call Number: James Joyce Library General CollectionISBN: 9780099598480Publication Date: 2015"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon. . ." This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture. Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets. From Red's father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red's grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, here are four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their anchor. Brimming with all the insight, humor, and generosity of spirit that are the hallmarks of Anne Tyler's work, A Spool of Blue Thread tells a poignant yet unsentimental story in praise of family in all its emotional complexity. It is a novel to cherish.
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