The 2020 Booker Prize shortlist is here!

The six books on the highly anticipated 2020 Booker Prize shortlist were announced overnight, revealing a shortlist that might just be the most diverse in the Booker’s history.

Four debut novelists, including Avni Doshi (Burnt Sugar) and Brandon Taylor (Real Life), are now up for the £50,000 fiction prize, alongside novels from two established authors. The shortlist is also mostly comprised of American authors, save one (the Zimbabwean author, playwright and activist Tsitsi Dangarembga). Each of the shortlisted authors will receive £2,500 in prize money, along with a specially bound edition of their book.

Inevitably, there are one or two notable absences from the list that have raised eyebrows across the literary world, namely Hilary Mantel’s historical novel The Mirror and the Light–the third in a trilogy where both prior instalments were Booker winners–and Kiley Reid’s witty exploration of race, Such a Fun Age. Nevertheless, the judging panel remains confident in their choices.

Margaret Busby, Chair of the 2020 judges, said,

‘As judges we read 162 books, many of them conveying important, sometimes uncannily similar and prescient messages. The best novels often prepare our societies for valuable conversations, and not just about the inequities and dilemmas of the world − whether in connection with climate change, forgotten communities, old age, racism, or revolution when necessary − but also about how magnificent the interior life of the mind, imagination and spirit is, in spite of circumstance. The shortlist of six came together unexpectedly, voices and characters resonating with us all even when very different. We are delighted to help disseminate these chronicles of creative humanity to a global audience.’

The 2020 Booker Prize winner will be announced on the 19th of November in London. Scroll down to see the full shortlist!

The Shadow King

by Maaza Mengiste

With the threat of Mussolini’s army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid in Kidane and his wife Aster’s household. Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie’s army, rushes to mobilise his strongest men before the Italians invade. Meanwhile, Mussolini’s hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers march on Ethiopia expecting an easy victory.

The Shadow King is a gorgeously crafted and unputdownable exploration of female power, with Hirut as the fierce, original, and brilliant voice at its heart.

Buy it here

This Mournable Body

by Tsitsi Dangarembga

In this tense and psychologically charged novel, Tsitsi Dangarembga channels the hope and potential of one young girl and a fledgling nation to lead us on a journey to discover where lives go after hope has departed.

Here we meet Tambudzai, living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare and anxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job. At every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.

Buy it here

Burnt Sugar

by Avni Doshi

In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless ‘artist’ – all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, mixing up her maid’s wages and leaving the gas on all night, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her.

This is a love story and it is a story about betrayal. But not between lovers – between mother and daughter.

Buy it here

The New Wilderness

by Diane Cook

Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away. The smog and pollution of the overdeveloped, overpopulated metropolis they call home is ravaging her lungs. Bea knows she cannot stay in the City, but there is only one alternative: The Wilderness State. Mankind has never been allowed to venture into this vast expanse of untamed land. Until now.

At once a blazing lament of our contempt for nature and a deeply humane portrayal of motherhood, The New Wilderness is an extraordinary, urgent novel from a celebrated new literary voice.

Buy it here

Shuggie Bain

by Douglas Stuart

It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest.

Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride.

Buy it here

Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

Wallace has spent his summer in the lab breeding a strain of microscopic worms, a slow and painstaking process. He is four years into a biochemistry degree at a lakeside Midwestern university, a life that’s a world away from his childhood growing up in Alabama. His father died a few weeks ago, but Wallace has not been home, and he hasn’t told his friends – Miller, Yngve, Cole and Emma. For reasons of self-preservation, he has become used to keeping a wary distance even from those closest to him.

Over the course of one blustery end-of-summer weekend, a catastrophic mishap and a series of intense confrontations force Wallace to grapple with intimacy, desire, the trauma of the past and the question of the future.

Buy it here

Congratulations to all of the authors on the 2020 Booker Prize shortlist!

Find out more about the Booker Prizes here.

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Olivia Fricot

Olivia Fricot (she/her) is Booktopia's Senior Content Producer and editor of the Booktopian blog. She has too many plants and not enough bookshelves, and you can usually find her reading, baking, or talking to said plants. She is pro-Oxford comma.

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