Sri Lankan Tamil author in Booker Prize shortlist; Sunjeev Sahota misses out

SRI LANKAN Tamil author Anuk Arudpragasam's A Passage North was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021, along with five others.

The others on the list are South African author Damon Galgut for The Promise, Americans Patricia Lockdwood for No One is Talking About this, Richard Powers for Bewilderment, Maggie Shipstead for Great Circle; and British Somali author Nadifa Mohamed The Fortune Men.

The list, unveiled at a virtual event in London on Tuesday (14), includes six finalists, with an equal male-female author split.

British Indian novelist Sunjeev Sahota's China Room, which was on the longlist, missed out in the final running.

Judge Horatia Harrod said, “We felt that (Anuk) was taking on with great seriousness this question of how can you grasp the present, while also trying to make sense of the past?”

Arudpragasam was born in 1988 in Colombo, Sri Lanka to Tamil parents. He moved to the US at the age of 18 to attend Stanford University, graduating with in 2010.

After graduating from Stanford, he lived in Tamil Nadu for a year. He later completed his PhD in philosophy at Columbia University in 2019.

His debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage was published in 2016. A Passage North is his second novel published in 2021.

Sahota, whose grandparents emigrated from Punjab in the 1960s, has been previously shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize for The Year of the Runaways and is a winner of the European Union Prize for Literature in 2017.

The 40-year-old missed out on 2021 shortlist along with previous winner British Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro for Klara and the Sun.

The shortlist was chosen from 158 novels published in the UK or Ireland between October 2020 and September 2021. This year’s judges included writer and editor Horatia Harrod, actor Natascha McElhone, twice Booker-shortlisted novelist and professor Chigozie Obioma, and writer and former Archbishop Rowan Williams.

The 2021 winner will be announced on November 3.