Neel Mukherjee, a Kolkata-born British citizen, on Wednesday emerged as the only Indian-origin writer to be named in this year’s Man Booker Prize longlist of authors vying for the prize in its debut as a global literary award.
london-based Mukherjee has been selected for his second novel, ‘The lives of Others’, published in May this year. The book is based in the author’s birth place of Kolkata and centres around a dysfunctional Ghosh family in the 1960s.
Mukherjee, who went on to study at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, reviews fiction for the ‘Times’ and the ‘Sunday Telegraph’. His first novel ‘A life Apart’ was a joint winner of the Vodafone-Crossword Award in India. There are six novels from Britain, five from the US, one from Australia and one from Ireland shortlisted for the prize.
For the first time in its 46-year history, the 50,000 pounds prize has been opened up to writers of any nationality, writing originally in English and published in the UK. Previously, the prize was open to authors from the UK & Commonwealth, Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe.