Four British novels will compete against a Jamaican epic and an American domestic drama for the prestigious Booker Prize, as the judges on Tuesday unveiled a shortlist of “idiosyncratic” stories. As artists, politicians and tech leaders around the world sound the alarm about the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, judges of the annual award said they had selected a “very human” shortlist. “These books, we truly believe, cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence. These are very human books,” said judge and poet Raymond Antrobus. The six-strong shortlist includes two heavyweight entries by past Booker winners: “John of John” by Douglas Stuart and Marlon James’s “The Disappearers”. Lauded by critics, the over 600-page epic by Caribbean author James follows the survivor of a brutal homophobic attack against a troupe of gay actors in 1980s Kingston. Scottish-American writer Stuart -- who won the Booker in 2020 for “Shuggie Bain” -- returns to the shortlist with his poignant exploration of a father-son bond strained by shame and secrets, set on the far-flung Outer Hebrides in Scotland. The other shortlisted books include American novelist Elizabeth Strout’s “The Things We Never Say”, and Brits Luke Kennard (“Black Bag”), M. John Harrison (“The End of Everything”) and Rebecca Perry (“May We Feed the King”). “These novels range from the hilarious to the discomfiting, from the frighteningly strange to the alarmingly domestic,” chair of the judges, classicist Mary Beard said. The prize was scooped last year by British-Hungarian writer David Szalay for “Flesh”, which explores themes of male alienation. This year’s male-heavy shortlist also probes questions of gender roles and sexuality. ‘Variety’ “Men are having to rethink their role, I suppose. And that’s reflected in the books that they’re writing,” judge Jarvis Cocker, frontman of the Britpop band Pulp, told reporters ahead of the shortlist announcement. “When we first started reading, I think it’s fair to say that most of the books we were putting through were by women,” adding Cocker, only half-joking. “It took a while actually to get a book written by a man that seemed good.” The finalists were selected from a longlist of 13 books, whittled down from 163 submissions for the prize, which celebrates the best long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the last year. The winner will be announced on Nov. 9 in a London ceremony. “We really wanted to build a list that was full of variety, that had lots of things that were idiosyncratic, that might not be universally loved, that might draw a strong opinion,” added Rebecca Liu, a writer and critic. “The End of Everything” is an enigmatic, apocalyptic novel set on England’s windswept eastern coast and Strout’s tender Massachusetts-based novel offers a “calm antidote to contemporary events”, according to the Booker judges. Kennard’s satire follows a struggling actor who gets paid to wear a black leather bag on his head by a psychology professor, while Perry turns to a reluctant medieval king in her debut novel.
