Booker Prize Shortlist Readings
Meet the six authors up for this year’s Booker Prize, as they read from and discuss their shortlisted books with novelist Sara Collins.
The Booker Prize is the world’s most significant award for the best sustained work of fiction written in English by authors from anywhere in the world and published in the UK and/or Ireland. It has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades.
Hear from the six authors in the running for this year’s £50,000 prize at this event.
This year’s shortlist was described by Esi Edugyan, Chair of the Booker Prize 2023 judges, as ‘vibrant and electric’. She says: ‘Together these works showcase the breadth of what world literature can do, while gesturing at the unease of our moment.’
The Booker Prize 2023 shortlist is:
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein, published by Granta Books
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, published by 4th Estate
This Other Eden by Paul Harding, published by Hutchinson Heinemann
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, published by Oneworld
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, published by Picador
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, published by Hamish Hamilton
Sara Collins is a novelist, screenwriter and occasional broadcaster. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for 17 years before obtaining a master’s degree in creative writing with distinction from Cambridge University in 2016, where she was the recipient of the Michael Holroyd Prize.
She is the author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2019), which was a Times bestseller, was shortlisted for a British Book Award, won the Costa First Novel Award and was adapted for a 2023 ITV show of the same name, for which she wrote the screenplay and served as an executive producer.
Collins is also a literary critic and has written for The Guardian and the Washington Post, and has frequently appeared on BBC Radio 4’s show Open Book and Audible’s The Graham Norton Book Club.
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