The Booker Prize 2023

‘The best novels invoke a sense of timelessness even while saying something about how we live now. Our six finalists are marvels of form. Some look unflinchingly at the ways in which trauma can be absorbed and passed down through the generations, as much an inheritance as a well-worn object or an unwanted talent. Some turn a gleeful, dissecting eye on everyday encounters. Some paint visceral portraits of societies pushed to the edge of tolerance. All are fuelled by a kind of relentless truth-telling, even when that honesty forces us to confront dark acts. And yet however long we may pause in the shadows, humour, decency, and grace are never far from hand.  

‘Together these works showcase the breadth of what world literature can do, while gesturing at the unease of our moment. From Bernstein and Harding’s outsiders attempting to establish lives in societies that reject them, to the often-funny struggles of Escoffery and Murray’s adolescents as they carve out identities for themselves beyond their parents’ mistakes, to Maroo and Lynch’s elegant evocations of family grief – each speaks distinctly about our shared journeys while refusing to be defined as any one thing. These are supple stories with many strands, many moods, in whose complications we come to recognise ourselves. They are vibrant, nervy, electric. In these novelists’ hands, form is pushed hard to see what it yields, and it is always something astonishing. Language – indeed, life itself – is thrust to its outer limits.’

Real events and experiences inspired the shortlistees. This Other Eden uses the true story of Malaga Island as a springboard for a story in which an isolated community faces an existential crisis when white outsiders arrive to educate, study and eventually destroy them. Prophet Song takes Syria’s tyranny, unrest and refugee crisis and places it in a reimagined Ireland.     

Questions about identity and belonging appear throughout the shortlist. Study for Obedience places its central character in an unnamed country where her ancestors have been persecuted and where the locals are fearful of her. In If I Survive You, Trelawny, born in America to Jamaican parents, struggles to work out how he fits into his own family and to society in general.  

Several books on the shortlist feature families in crisis. In Western Lane, three British-Indian sisters are coming to terms with the death of their mother. In The Bee Sting, financial problems and dark secrets threaten to shatter an entire family. In Prophet Song, a mother struggles to hold her family together as Ireland slides into totalitarianism and her husband is imprisoned by repressive government forces. Two of the books, The Bee Sting and If I Survive You, shift between the perspectives of different family members.   

The shortest book on the list is Western Lane, at 161 pages, while the longest is The Bee Sting, at 640 pages. The longest winner in the prize’s history is Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (832 pages, 2013), while the shortest is Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore (132 pages, 1979).    

There have been plenty of accolades for this year’s shortlistees. Sarah Bernstein was named on Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2023 list earlier this year. Paul Harding won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his first novel, Tinkers. Paul Lynch’s awards include the 2022 Gens de Mer Prize, the 2020 Ireland Francophonie Ambassadors’ Literary Award and the 2018 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award. Paul Murray’s novel, Skippy Dies, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2010 and his novel The Mark and the Void, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize in 2016. Chetna Maroo (2022) and Jonathan Escoffery (2020) have been awarded the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction.

Esi Edugyan (Chair) is the internationally bestselling author of Washington Black, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Literary Excellence, among others – and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It was chosen by both the New York Times and Barack Obama as one of the best books of 2018. The epic Hulu/Disney TV series of Washington Black, starring Sterling K Brown and co-produced by Edugyan, is slated for release in Spring 2023.

Edugyan’s other novels include The Second Life of Samuel Tyne and Half-Blood Blues, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2011, as well as for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Governor General’s Literary Award. Half-Blood Blues won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

Edugyan is also the author of Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home and more recently Out of the Sun: Essays at the Crossroads of Race, delivered in Canada as the Massey Lectures. Her first children’s book, Garden of Lost Socks, will be published next year by HarperCollins Canada.

Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, Edygyan is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Victoria, where she now lives. She has held fellowships in the US, Scotland, Iceland, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Spain, and Belgium, and judged prizes including the Giller Prize with Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Lethem.

Mary Jean Chan is one of British poetry’s fastest rising stars. Flèche, a debut collection ingeniously organised around the sport of fencing, was published by Faber & Faber in 2019 and Faber USA in 2020. It won the Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for numerous awards, including the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. In 2018, Chan’s title poem from Flèche won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, awarded annually by the Poetry Society. Chan has twice been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem and received a Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award for a collection by a poet under the age of 30 in 2019. That year, Chan was chosen by Jackie Kay as one of Kay’s ten best BAME writers in Britain.

In 2022, Chan co-edited with Andrew McMillan the landmark Vintage anthology 100 Queer Poems, which was recently selected as a Guardian Best Poetry Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards. Chan’s poetry, essays and reviews have been featured in or are forthcoming from the New Republic, the New Statesman, the London Review of Books, Granta, the Poetry Review and the White Review, with their reviews appearing regularly in the Guardian. As an early career academic, Chan has written for the Review of English Studies, the Journal of American Studies and the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Chan currently lives in Oxford and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University while also serving as a supervisor on the MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. In 2022, Chan was a Visiting Writer at the NTU Asia Creative Writing Programme in Singapore. Chan is a Rathbones Folio Prize Academy member, having judged the 2019 and 2020 Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation, the 2022 Jhalak Prize and the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. Chan’s second book, Bright Fear, is forthcoming from Faber in August 2023.

Robert Webb was born in Lincolnshire in 1972 and attended Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Horncastle. He studied English at Cambridge, where he joined Footlights and met David Mitchell, forming the comedy partnership Mitchell and Webb. They went on to make five series of their Sony Award-winning BBC Radio 4 sketch show, That Mitchell and Webb Sound, and for television, four series of the Bafta-winning That Mitchell and Webb Look for BBC2.

As an actor, Webb is best known for playing Jeremy Usborne in Peep Show, which ran for nine series, making it Channel 4’s longest-running sitcom. The programme won another two Baftas, two British Comedy awards and in 2004 was awarded the prestigious Rose D’Or for Best Comedy. In the theatre, Webb has played numerous roles in London’s West End, most notably in the Olivier Award-winning Jeeves and Wooster: Perfect Nonsense, in which he gave a performance described by the critic Frank Cottrell-Boyce as ‘the definitive Bertie Wooster of his generation’.

In 2009 he won the BBC1 charity dance competition, Let’s Dance for Comic Relief, giving a memorable interpretation of the audition scene from the movie Flashdance. In 2021 he competed for three weeks in BBC1’s Strictly Come Dancing before having to withdraw due to health issues (from which he has now fully recovered).

Webb’s documentary My Life In Verse focussed on the work of T S Eliot and featured Andrew Motion and Clive James among others. His 2017 memoir How Not To Be a Boy entered The Sunday Times non-fiction chart at number one, was serialised in the Guardian and was abridged for Radio 4’s Book of the Week. The audiobook, narrated by Webb himself, was Audible’s bestselling memoir of 2017. His debut novel Come Again was published in 2020, with the audiobook read by Olivia Colman.

He has written a weekly column for The Daily Telegraph, been an occasional contributor to The New Statesman and judged the BBC Young Writers’ Award. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Lincoln.

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein  

What the author said: ‘I was trying to think through what it might look like if certain (usually feminised) characteristics associated with passivity could take on a kind of power, especially over the people reinforcing those sorts of gendered norms. That idea comes from the painter Paula Rego – that obedience can, in a sense, also be murderous – it can be harmful to the person demanding obedience. I was also interested in the question of innocence and the really bizarre expectation that, in order for someone’s suffering to be recognised as legitimate, that person needs also to be innocent – whatever that means.’  

What the judges said: ‘A stirring meditation on survival and a pointed critique of the demonisation of the outsider.’  

This Other Eden by Paul Harding   

What the author said: ‘The line I tried as best I could to draw between fact and fiction was the maybe couple of dozen factual details that most struck me in the limited reading I did about Malaga Island and what they subsequently led to when I imagined my way beyond them. From the moment the historical events began to suggest connections with stories like Noah’s Ark, the Garden of Eden, The Tempest, Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs, Moby Dick, Harriet Jacob’s memoir, and so forth, I moved toward the purely fictional because I wanted a kind of poetic licence to intermingle the material with those influences.’

What the judges said: ‘It’s rare to encounter a work of historical fiction that is at once so lyrical and so empathetic.’

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo  

What the author said: ‘It’s fair to call it a sports novel. It’s also been called a coming-of-age novel, a domestic novel, a novel about grief, a novel about the immigrant experience. Recently a friend asked me if the book has something of the detective story about it, with Gopi trying to find her way, piecing together the clues of small gestures, actions and fragments of overheard conversations; she has little to go on and since she’s dealing with the mysteries of loss, there are no answers for her.’ 

What the judges said: ‘A mesmerising novel about how silence can reverberate within a family in the aftermath of grief’.