LONDON — The Booker Prize judges unveiled their six-book shortlist on Tuesday, a selection that literary critics described as one of the most adventurous in the prize's history, featuring debut novelists from Nigeria, South Korea, and Colombia alongside established authors from the United Kingdom and Australia.
The shortlisted titles are: The Paper Cartographers by Adaeze Okonkwo (Nigeria), Where Silence Carries Its Own Weight by Min-Ji Park (South Korea), The Cartography of Forgetting by Elena Vargas Molina (Colombia), Tidal Hours by James Pemberton (UK), All the Names We Abandoned by Ruth Whitfield (UK), and The Last Saltwater Farm by Daniel Ngata (Australia).
The Judges' View
Chair of judges Professor Elspeth Harrington said the panel was struck by how many submissions this year interrogated the novel form itself. "We read books that used unreliable archives, epistolary structures, interwoven timelines, and typographic experimentation," she said. "The shortlist is a fair sample of the breadth we encountered."
Where Silence Carries Its Own Weight, Min-Ji Park's debut about a family navigating dementia told from six overlapping perspectives with no chapter breaks, is widely regarded as the favourite.