Oyinkan Braithwaite & Chigozie Obioma make 2019 Booker Prize Longlist

We’re so happy for Oyinkan Braithwaite whose stunning debut novel My Sister, the Serial Killer has been longlisted for arguably the most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize.

Described as “skilful, sharp and engaging a debut as any first novelist can produce,” Oyinkan’s novel is the only debut on the 13-man longlist also featuring Chigozie Obioma‘s An Orchestra of Minorities.

Chigozie had been shortlisted in 2015 for his debut The Fishermen, and his second novel is loosely based on the Odyssey.

Others on the shortlist are:

• Margaret Atwood from Canada for her highly anticipated novel, The Testaments.
• Kevin Barry from Ireland for his crime fiction, Night Boat to Tangier.
• Lucy Ellmann from the USA/UK for her 1000-word single sentence novel, Ducks, Newburyport.
• Bernardine Evaristo from the UK for her novel about the lives of black women, Girl, Woman, Other.
• John Lanchester from the UK for his dystopian novel, The Wall.
• Deborah Levy from the UK for her novel which slips between time zones, The Man Who Saw Everything.
• Valeria Luiselli from Mexico/Italy for her first novel published in the English Language, Lost Children Archive.
• Max Porter from the UK for his novel about a missing boy, Lanny.
• Salman Rushdie from the India for his novel based on Don Quixote, Quichotte.
• Elif Shafak from the Turkey for her novel which details the memories of a dead Istanbul sex worker, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.
• and Jeanette Winterson from the UK for her novel based on Frankenstein, Frankissstein.

The Booker Prize (formerly the Man Booker Prize) is a £50,000 prize awarded to the best novel written in the English Language. Until 2014, it was awarded to only novels written by writers from the Commonwealth, Irish, South African and Zimbabwe.

Nigerian magical realism writer Ben Okri won the prize in 1991 for his novel The Famished Road.

You can read excerpts of Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, whose copies we gave away, on BellaNaija here, here, here and here.