Anna Burns Wins the 2018 Man Booker Prize

Anna Burn‘s Milkman has won the 2018 Man Booker Prize, which makes her the first Northern Irish winner in the prize’s history—and breaks the dreaded potential outcome: three straight years of U.S. winners.

Set in an unnamed city with unnamed characters, the novel focuses on middle sister as she “navigates her way through rumour, social pressures and politics in a tight-knit community.” About her own novel, Burns told the Man Booker website that “‘The book didn’t work with names. It lost power and atmosphere and turned into a lesser — or perhaps just a different — book. In the early days I tried out names a few times, but the book wouldn’t stand for it. The narrative would become heavy and lifeless and refuse to move on until I took them out again. Sometimes the book threw them out itself’.”

In a unanimous decision, Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Booker’s chair of judges, said the experimental novel—which is a novel about a young world being sexually harassed by a powerful man—was “incredible original” and that “none of us has ever read anything like this before.”

Here are the authors that made this year’s short and long lists.

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