The longlist for the 2021 Booker Prize was announced on Tuesday 27 July 2021.
The 13 books on this year’s longlist were chosen by the 2021 judging panel: historian Maya Jasanoff (chair); writer and editor Horatia Harrod; actor Natascha McElhone; twice Booker-shortlisted novelist and professor Chigozie Obioma; and writer and former Archbishop Rowan Williams. The list was chosen from 158 novels published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2020 and 30 September 2021.The Booker Prize for Fiction is open to works by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.
The 2021 longlist, or ‘The Booker Dozen’, of 13 novels, is:
- A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam (Granta Books, Granta Publications)
- Second Place, Rachel Cusk, (Faber)
- The Promise, Damon Galgut, (Chatto & Windus, Vintage, PRH)
- The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris (Tinder Press, Headline, Hachette Book Group)
- Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber)
- An Island, Karen Jennings (Holland House Books)
- A Town Called Solace, Mary Lawson (Chatto & Windus, Vintage, PRH)
- No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood (Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing)
- The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed (Viking, Penguin General, PRH)
- Bewilderment, Richard Powers (Hutchinson Heinemann, PRH)
- China Room, Sunjeev Sahota (Harvill Secker, Vintage, PRH)
- Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead (Doubleday, Transworld Publishers, PRH)
- Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford (Faber).
Two of these books – Second Place and Klara and the Sun – have been reviewed by the Queensland Reviewers Collective:
Second Place by Rachel Cusk – Queensland Reviewers Collective
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro – Queensland Reviewers Collective
The Shortlist will be released on 14 September 2021 and the winner announced on 3 November 2021.