News that two Irish authors had made this year’s Booker longlist was greeted with a fair amount of patriotic excitement. Sebastian Barry and Mike McCormack haven’t just made the longlist, they have a good chance of featuring on the shortlist too – and it has been several cold years since an Irish novel made it to the final six.
There was a time when Ireland was cock of the walk, in the 1990s and mid to late 2000s, clocking up three wins. The last win was Anne Enright’s The Gathering a decade ago, and we haven’t made the shortlist since Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary in 2013. Not coincidentally, that was the year everything changed. Until 2013, entry to the Booker prize was limited to authors from the UK, Ireland and the Commonwealth. From 2014, it was open to any author writing in English whose book was published in the UK. American writers had become eligible.
As wonderful as inclusivity is, the book nerd in me lost a little interest in the prize; without parameters it wasn’t as fun, or easy, to guess who might get nominated. As someone with little interest in sport, it also robbed me of the chance to wave around my metaphorical Tricolour. This year, however, I have a good feeling.
Barry is a heavyweight who has been nominated twice before. His novel Days Without End has already won the Costa Book of the Year. McCormack is packing a strong punch in the underdog’s corner. The Mayo author has a great story: a writer loved by other writers but ignored by publishing houses until a small Irish company took him on.
Tramp Press’s support for Solar Bones, which it originally published in Ireland in 2016, has surely contributed to its chances of success. The book received rave reviews in the UK and Ireland, but wasn’t eligible for the 2016 Booker prize because Tramp is an Irish publishing house and it must be released by a British publisher. The Irish publisher objected to this exclusion and its argument got attention on both sides of the Irish Sea. Independent Scottish publisher Canongate subsequently took it on and eligibility was fulfilled.
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Solar Bones has the novelty of being written in a single sentence and the bona fides of winning the Goldsmith prize, the award you want when you’re entering the race as the experimental underdog.
The longlist of 13 novels, a “Booker dozen”, is divided between heavyweights and underdogs. Alongside Barry in the former group is 4321 by Paul Auster, Swing Time by Zadie Smith and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy, the only previous Booker winner. Debut novel Elmet from Fiona Mozley, a PhD student working in a York bookshop, was the biggest surprise on the list, while Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West offers some genre-blurring to rival McCormack’s modernism.
The competition is strong but even against the might of US and British literature, we may get two Irish entries on the Booker shortlist. If so, it’ll be the first time since 2005 when John Banville’s The Sea went on to win. And if those words need eating I’ll be doing it on September 13 when the shortlist is announced.