The much-anticipated shortlist for the Man Booker Prize 2013 is out and the Indian-born U.S.-based author Jhumpa Lahiri’s book The Lowland finds a place on it. She is one of six writers whose books have made it to the shortlist.
The Lowland is Ms. Lahiri’s fourth novel. Her first The Interpreter of Maladies (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her second novel, The Namesake (2003) was made into a popular film. She also wrote Unaccustomed Earth (2008).
The other five novels on the shortlist are We Need New Names is by the young Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo, The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, The Harvest by Jim Crace, A Tale for the Time Being by the Ruth Ozeki and The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin.
The Booker Prize Foundation in its announcement of the shortlist noted that the books are “fiendishly difficult to categorise.”
“The times represented stretch from the biblical Middle East (Tóibín) to contemporary Zimbabwe (NoViolet Bulawayo) by way of 19th-century New Zealand (Catton), 1960s India (Jumpha Lahiri), 18th-century rural England (Crace) and modern Tokyo (Ruth Ozeki),” the statement says. “It shows that the novel remains a multi-faceted thing; that writing and inspiration knows no geographical borders; that diaspora tales are a powerful strand in imaginative thinking; and that human voices, in all their diversity, drive fiction.”
The winner of the >2012 Booker Prize was Hillary Mantel for Bring up the Bodies .
