Longlist for Man Booker Prize Revealed: Will Coetzee Win Thrice?

Celebrated South African novelist JM Coetzee and US Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout are among the contenders announced on Wednesday for Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction.

Coetzee’s The Schooldays of Jesus and Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton are among the best-known titles on a 13-book longlist that spurned big-name writers including Ian McEwan and Don DeLillo in favour of less famous authors and first-time novelists.

Coetzee, who lives in Australia, is the early bookies’ favorite and will become the first triple Booker winner if he takes the prize. He won in 1983 with Life and Times of Michael K and in 1999 with Disgrace.

Strout won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2009 for Olive Kitteridge, which was turned into a HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand.

The eclectic list features four first novels — David Means’ Hystpoia, Wyl Menmuir’s The Many, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen and Virginia Reeves’ Work Like Any Other – alongside established authors such as AK Kennedy for Serious Sweet and Deborah Levy for Hot Milk.

There’s also a rare nomination for a crime thriller, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project.

The list includes six British writers (one of them, David Szalay, born in Canada), five Americans and a Canadian, Madeleine Thien, for Do Not Say We Have Nothing.

Biographer Amanda Foreman, who chairs the five-member judging panel, said the books had “provoked intense discussion and, at times, passionate debate, challenging our expectations of what a novel is and can be.”

Previously open to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, the Booker expanded in 2014 to include all English-language authors. Despite fears of US dominance, there has not yet been an American winner of the prize, which usually brings the victor a huge sales boost.

Six finalists will be announced September 13 and the winner of the 50,000 pound ($65,000) prize will be named on October 25.