Marlon James and Douglas Stuart are both in contention to win the Booker Prize and become two-time winners when it is awarded Monday in London.
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The Booker Prize for fiction will be awarded Monday in London, with Jamaican author Marlon James and Scotland’s Douglas Stuart both viewed as potential two-time winners.
James is the oddsmakers’ favourite to take the £50,000 ($67,000) prize for “The Disappearers,” which follows a group of gay men in hostile 1980s Jamaica.
Stuart is also among those favoured, for “John of John,” a novel about father-son secrets on a remote Scottish island.
A win by either James or Stuart would make that author the fifth person to win the Booker twice, joining J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood.
James previously won the Booker in 2015 for “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” while Stuart took the prize in 2020 for “Shuggie Bain.”
The shortlist for this year’s Booker has been reduced from 163 submitted novels, with judges describing the finalists as “moving, pacey, funny, violent, intriguing, horrifying and hopeful.”
Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout is also on the shortlist for “The Things We Never Say,” about a small-town New England teacher in crisis.
Strout’s book “Oh William!” was a Booker finalist in 2022, and she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009 for “Olive Kitteridge.”
A panel of judges led by classicist Mary Beard is also considering three books by British authors: M. John Harrison’s apocalyptic saga “The End of Everything,” Luke Kennard’s satirical campus novel “Black Bag,” and Rebecca Perry’s Medieval-to-modern tale “May We Feed the King.”
Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize is open to novels written in English from any country, published in the U.K. and Ireland, and has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers. Last year’s winner was “Flesh” by Hungarian-British writer David Szalay.
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