Two Irish writers make Booker longlist

TWO Irish authors are among the 13 to have made the “Man Booker dozen” longlist out of a total of 138 books.

They are Dubliner Emma Donoghue, 40, author of Room, and Paul Murray, 35, author of Skippy Dies.

In Room, the protagonists are Ma and her five-year-old son, Jack who has never left the room he was born and brought up in. It was inspired by the stories of Elizabeth Fritzl and Natascha Kampusch, two Austrian women held prisoner for many years.

Skippy Dies, described as a “comic epic”, is set in Seabrook College Dublin, where disingenuous parents hide their materialism behind a phoney conviction in the college’s so-called Roman Catholic values.

Peter Carey, one of only two authors to have won the prize twice, has also been longlisted for his novel Parrot and Oliver in America. He won the Booker Prize in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang.

However Andrea Levy is the bookies’ favourite to triumph this year for her novel The Long Song, set on a sugar cane plantation in 19th century Jamaica.

Other entrants for this year’s prize include the hotly-tipped David Mitchell for his book The Thousand Autumns of Zacob de Zoet. Mitchell has previously been shortlisted twice before.

Two other longlist nominees have also made the Man Booker Prize shortlist previously.

Damon Galgut, included on this year’s longlist for his novel In a Strange Room, was shortlisted in 2003 for The Good Doctor. Former Booker Prize judge Rose Tremain, longlisted this year for Trespass, was shortlisted in 1989 for Restoration.

Chairman of the judges, former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, said: “Here are 13 exceptional novels — books we have chosen for their intrinsic quality, without reference to the past work of their authors,” he said.

The remaining authors on the longlist include Helen Dunmore, The Betrayal; Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question; Tom McCarthy, C; Lisa Moore, February; Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap; and Alan Warner, The Stars in the Bright Sky.

The shortlist will be announced on September 7, with the winner announced on October 12. The winner of the Man Booker Prize will receive £50,000 (€60,000).