Man Booker prize 2011 longlist includes quartet of debut novels

Author Yvvette Edwards grew up and attended school in Hackney. Photograph: Danielle Acquah

This article titled “Man Booker prize 2011 longlist includes quartet of debut novels” was written by Mark Brown, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 26th July 2011 17.22 UTC

A debut novel chronicling gang warfare in Peckham has joined efforts by a former Man Booker winner, Alan Hollinghurst, and Julian Barnes – the novelist many people mistakenly think must have won – on this year’s longlist for the prestigious prize.

Stephen Kelman, who was a warehouseman, care worker and local government administrator before taking up writing in 2005, was longlisted for Pigeon English, one of the more eye-catching additions to a lineup that includes four first-time novelists.

The book, which draws on the murder of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor and for a time languished on a literary agency’s slush pile, eventually became the subject of a bidding war last year before being picked up – shrewdly, as it turns out – by Bloomsbury.

The list is striking for its range of subject matter although, given that a former spymaster is in charge, a bit more intrigue might have been expected. But former MI5 director Dame Stella Rimington told the Guardian: “There is no espionage, no … there are, though, two post-cold war books. Not because of me, but by general agreement.”

It took judges around two hours to get the list down to 13 from the 138 books read. “We’ve had a lot of fun today,” said Rimington. “It was an impassioned debate, but – without any acrimony and with a great deal of humour – we’ve come up with a longlist we’re all pleased with.

“It is a list of considerable variety, not only in the subjects but in the range of authors.”

Rimington admitted it had been “a weighty burden being a judge but also extremely enjoyable and entertaining.”

The Man Booker’s literary director Ion Trewin said: “This is my seventh prize and every year is different from the previous one. I’m particularly pleased to see four first novels and also unfamiliar publishers. That’s great, because that’s where the future is.

“[The longlist] seems to me to be as far-ranging in subject matter as I can recall. One of the things that’s changed over the years is that it used to be very much, quote, ‘literary fiction’. Now, if it’s particularly good, what you might call genre [is] no bar to it being listed.”

Evidence of that is DJ Taylor’s Victorian mystery Derby Day, a book that could easily be called a thriller – a very rare thing on the Man Booker longlists.

The one book predicted by almost everyone is Alan Hollinghurst’s sweeping tale of poetry, class and ambiguous sexual identities, The Stranger’s Child. The author, who won seven years ago with his last novel, The Line of Beauty, was straight away installed as 5-1 favourite by William Hill.

His 584-page book is in stark contrast to second favourite Julian Barnes. A Man Booker bridesmaid, Barnes – shortlisted three times – makes the list with his 150-page offering, The Sense of an Ending.

Another familiar name is Sebastian Barry, shortlisted twice before, who is included with On Canaan’s Side, in which an old lady looks back on a long life that took her from Dublin to Chicago.

The list includes novels which failed to make it on to the radar of newspaper literary editors, among them Yvvette Edwards’ A Cupboard Full of Coats, which was reviewed, briefly, in only one national title. The Hackney Citizen helped fill the gap, calling it a gripping tale “of anguish and guilt”.

Then there are three Canadian novels which have, as yet, made little impact in the UK: Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, Alison Pick’s Far To Go and Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan.

Other novels on the list are Carol Birch’s 11th novel, Jamrach’s Menagerie, which made the Orange prize longlist but not the shortlist; Patrick McGuiness for The Last Hundred Days, which examines the end of Ceausescu’s tyranny in Romania; AD Miller’s Snowdrops, a Moscow-set crime story; and Jane Rogers’s The Testament of Jessie Lamb.

Among the notable omissions were the 2007 winner Anne Enright. The Forgotten Waltz, a lively tale of Dublin adultery and mortgages, failed to make the cut, as did Last Man in Tower by the 2008 winner Aravind Adiga.

There was also no place for former winner Graham Swift or 2008 shortlisters Philip Hensher and Linda Grant.

The panel, chaired by Rimington, includes journalists Gaby Wood and Matthew d’Ancona, politician Chris Mullin and novelist Susan Hill, who also had a stint as a Booker judge 36 years ago when Ruth Prawer Jhabvala won for Heat and Dust.

The shortlist of six will be announced on 6 September and the winner on 18 October. He or she will win £50,000, but the prize is worth much more than that. Apart from the kudos, the winner can expect a dramatic upturn in sales.

• This article was amended on 28 July 2011. The original said Yvvette Edwards’ A Cupboard Full of Coats was not reviewed by any national newspaper. This has been corrected.

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