The 2022 Booker Prize long list was announced last week. Of the 13 longlisted authors, three are of Afro-Caribbean, NoViolet Bulawayo from Zimbabwe, Leila Motley and Percival Everett from the US. This year’s list is also notable for including both the youngest and oldest authors ever to be nominated.
Leila Motley – Nightcrawling
Nineteen year old Leila Motley’s Book Night Crawling is about the life of Kiara and her brother, Marcus who are just managing in an East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison. But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed.
One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.
Leila Mottley is native to Oakland, California, where at age 16, she was named 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. She has performed and led numerous poetry workshops, and has been published in various journals and anthologies in the United States. She began writing Nightcrawling at the age of 17, and it was published before she turned 20.
NoViolet Bulawayo – Glory
Glory follows the fall of the Old Horse, the long-serving leader of a fictional country, and the drama that follows for a rumbustious nation of animals on the path to true liberation. Inspired by the unexpected fall of Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president of nearly four decades, Glory shows a country’s imploding, narrated by a chorus of animal voices that unveil the ruthlessness required to uphold the illusion of absolute power and the imagination and bulletproof optimism to overthrow it completely. By immersing readers in the daily lives of a population in upheaval, Bulawayo reveals the dazzling life force and irresistible wit that lie barely concealed beneath the surface of seemingly bleak circumstances.
This is a second time nomination for NoViolet Bulawayo. Her debut novel We Need New Names was shortlisted in 2013, it was the winner of the inaugural Etisalat Prize for Literature, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction in the same year, and the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for debut work of fiction in 2014.
Bulawayo grew up in Zimbabwe and moved to Michigan aged eighteen. She earned her MFA at Cornell University, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she taught fiction. She is currently a full time writer.
Percival Everett – The Tree
Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till, a young black boy lynched in the same town 65 years before.
The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance
Percival Everett is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is the is the author of over 30 books, first publishing his debut, Suder, in 1983. His other novels include Erasure, I am not Sidney Poitier, Telephone and Damned If I Do.
His writing has earned him the PEN USA 2006 Literary Award (for his 2005 novel, Wounded), the Academy Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (for his 2001 novel, Erasure), the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature (for his 1996 story collection, Big Picture) and the New American Writing Award (for his 1990 novel, Zulus). He has served as a judge for, among others, the 1997 National Book Award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991
The other books on the longlist are The Colony by Audrey Magee, After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz, Small Things Like These written by Claire Keegan, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer, Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet, Treacle Walker by Alan Garner, Trust by Hernan Diaz, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout and Booth written by Karen Joy Fowler. The shortlist will be announced on 6 September and the winner on 17 October in an award ceremony at the Roundhouse and fully in person for the first time since 2019.