Hilary Mantel up for third Booker prize as 2020 longlist announced

Hilary Mantel’s “masterful” conclusion to her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, has been longlisted for the Booker prize, putting the British novelist in the running to win for an unprecedented third time.

Mantel’s 900-page novel, which opens after Anne Boleyn has been beheaded in 1536, and traces the final years of Cromwell, is one of 13 novels in the running for this year’s £50,000 prize. Judges chaired by publisher Margaret Busby said that Mantel’s “masterful exhibition of sly dialogue and exquisite description brings the Tudor world alive”.

The novelist, who won the Booker for the two previous novels in her trilogy, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, is one of only four authors to win the prestigious award twice, alongside Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey and JM Coetzee. No writer has yet won three times.

Mantel has said that while “it will be cast in terms of a disaster if I don’t win it again”, she would not perceive it as a snub if she lost.

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (US)

This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe)

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (US)

Who They Was by Gabriel Krauze (UK)

The Mirror and The Light by Hilary Mantel (UK)

Apeirogon by Colum McCann (Ireland-US)

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste (Ethiopia-US)

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (US)

Real Life by Brandon Taylor (US)

Redhead by The Side of the Road by Anne Tyler (US)

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Scotland-US)

Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward (UK)

How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang (US)

On a longlist packed with surprises and debuts, chosen from 162 novels, Mantel is up against major literary names including US author Anne Tyler, picked for Redhead by the Side of the Road, a work judges called “a very human tale of redemption”, as well as the Irish-American author Colum McCann, longlisted for Apeirogon, about a Palestinian and an Israeli, both of whom have lost their daughters.

Award-winning Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga is in the running for This Mournable Body, a sequel to her 1988 novel Nervous Conditions, named by the BBC as one of the 100 books that shaped the world. Judges said This Mournable Body “drew an immediate reaction like a sharp intake of breath from all of us on the panel”. Ethiopian-American author Maaza Mengiste is nominated for her second novel The Shadow King, set during Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia and praised by judges as “a brave, noble, gripping book that would not have been written at any other point in history”.

New novels by established writers, including Maggie O’Farrell, Curtis Sittenfeld, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Marilynne Robinson and Ben Lerner, all failed to make the cut. Instead, judges plumped for eight debuts, including Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, which opens as a black woman is accused of kidnapping the white girl she’s babysitting, and C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold, in which two Chinese children try to survive in the 19th-century American west after their impoverished parents die.

Other debuts include Real Life by US author Brandon Taylor, following a black, queer, introverted man from Alabama, which was described by judges as “a deeply painful, nuanced account of microaggressions, abuse, racism, homophobia, trauma, grief and alienation”. Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar, in which an Indian woman recalls her childhood neglect as her elderly mother’s memory begins to fade, was praised as “utterly compelling”. And Scottish-American author Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, following one boy’s childhood in Glasgow public housing in the 1980s, was called “an amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love”.

Independent press Oneworld, which won two consecutive Booker prizes with Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, also makes the cut this year for Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness, the short-story writer’s first novel. Following a mother who moves away from a polluted metropolis with her young daughter in order to take part in a radical experiment in the dangerous “Wilderness”, the judges called it a “wonderfully imagined … tense future-shock novel”.

Gaby Wood, literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, said that even the judges had been startled by the number of debuts.

“It is an unusually high proportion, and especially surprising to the judges themselves, who had admired many books by more established authors, and regretted having to let them go,” said Wood. “It is perhaps obvious that powerful stories can come from unexpected places and in unfamiliar forms; nevertheless, this kaleidoscopic list serves as a reminder.”

Six years after the Booker prize decided to open its doors to any writer writing in English and published in the UK, prompting widespread concerns about the potential dominance of US novelists, nine of the 13 writers up for this year’s award are either American or have dual US heritage.

Just three are from the UK alone: Mantel and debut novelists Gabriel Krauze and Sophie Ward. Krauze explores violence and vengeance in London in Who They Was, while Ward’s Love and Other Thought Experiments tells of the couple Rachel and Eliza, in a work judges described as “an extremely original, genre-bending novel that melds Anglo-American analytical philosophy with realist social drama and futuristic science fiction”.

Busby, whose judging panel includes thriller writer Lee Child, poet Lemn Sissay, critic Sameer Rahim and classicist Emily Wilson, said that each of the 13 novels selected by judges “carries an impact that has earned it a place on the longlist”.

“There are voices from minorities often unheard, stories that are fresh, bold and absorbing. The best fiction enables the reader to relate to other people’s lives; sharing experiences that we could not ourselves have imagined is as powerful as being able to identify with characters,” she said, describing the combination of new and established authors as “a truly satisfying outcome”.

A shortlist of six books will be unveiled on 15 September, with the winner announced in November.