Canada writer Anne Michaels among Booker Prize finalists

LONDON –

Canadian writer Anne Michaels is among six finalists shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction this year.

Organizers said Monday that Michaels is shortlisted for her novel “Held,” a story of memory, love and time that starts on a battlefield in France in 1917.

Five of the six authors are women — the largest number in the prize’s 55-year history. 

American writer Percival Everett, a 2022 Booker finalist for “The Trees,” is again nominated for “James,” which reimagines Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” from the point of view of its main Black character, the enslaved man Jim.

Rachel Kushner, another former Booker finalist from the U.S., with her bestseller “The Mars Room,” is a contender again with spy story “Creation Lake.”

The other finalists vying for the 50,000 pound (US$64,000) award are Britain’s Samantha Harvey, for “Orbital”; Australia’s Charlotte Wood for “Stone Yard Devotional”; and Yael van der Wouden — the first Dutch author to be shortlisted for the Booker — for her debut, “The Safekeep.”

Organizers said the stories transport readers from World War I battlefields to America’s Deep South in the 19th century to the International Space Station. 

“Here is storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity. The fault lines of our times are here,” said author Edmund de Waal, who chairs this year’s five-member judging panel. “They are books that made us want to keep on reading, to ring up friends and tell them about them.”

The winner will be announced on Nov. 12 at a ceremony in London.

Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize celebrates the best fiction and is open to novels from any country published in the U.K. and Ireland.