Man Booker fiction shortlist features Indian-origin author

By NewsGram Staff Writer

London: Sunjeev Sahota, an Indian-origin author, is among the half a dozen authors short-listed for the prestigious 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for his book 'The Year of the Runaways'.

Sahota, who received the Granta Best Young British Novelist award in 2013, is competing with fellow authors Briton Tom McCarthy, Jamaican Marlon James, US-based Anne Tyler and Hanya Yanagihara, and Nigerian Chigozie Obioma for the prize. 'The Year of the Runaways', Sahota's second book, deals with the experience of illegal immigrants from the Indian subcontinent in Britain.

Michael Wood, chair of the judges, announced the six names at a press conference held at the offices of sponsor Man Group.

This is the second year that the prize, first awarded in 1969, is open to writers of any nationality, writing originally in English and published in Britain. Previously, the prize was open only to authors from Britain and the Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe.

Sahota, a third-generation British-Indian born in 1981, debuted with 'Ours Are the Streets' in 2011, about a British Pakistani youth who becomes a suicide bomber.

Three of the six novels are represented by Pan Macmillan India, under its Picador imprint.

The shortlist includes James's 'A Brief History of Seven Killings', an imagined oral biography told by ghosts, witnesses, killers, members of the parliament, drug dealers, conmen, beauty queens, FBI and CIA agents, reporters, journalists, and even Rolling Stones' Keith Richards; as well as Yanagihara's 'A Little Life', described as a masterful depiction of heartbreak and a dark and haunting examination of the tyranny of experience and memory.

(With inputs from IANS)