Damon Galgut, who won the Booker last year for his portrait of a white South African family imploding, is now in the running for rival literary award the Rathbones Folio prize.
The South African author’s The Promise is one of eight titles in the running for the £30,000 Folio, which was first awarded in 2014 after controversy over comments from the Booker’s judges in 2011. The Booker panel that year had stressed the importance of books that “zip along”, and the Folio subsequently announced its intention to “establish a clear and uncompromising standard of excellence” in the titles it rewarded. Today, the Rathbones Folio is open across genres, to all works of literature written in English, and to English-language writers from around the world, with previous winners including poet Raymond Antrobus, short story writer George Saunders, and memoirist Carmen Maria Machado.
This year’s shortlist features six novels, with The Promise joined by the award-winning Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s fictionalised biography of Thomas Mann, The Magician. Natasha Brown’s debut Assembly, an exploration of identity and class, opens as a Black British woman prepares to attend a garden party at her boyfriend’s family estate, while Sunjeev Sahota’s China Room is the story of a young bride in rural Punjab. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These tells of courage and quiet heroism in Catholic Ireland, and Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms explores the connection between a semi-estranged mother and daughter.
The shortlist is completed with Philip Hoare’s Albert and the Whale, which tackles the intersection between life, art and the sea through the work of Albrecht Dürer, and Selima Hill’s poetry collection Men Who Feed Pigeons, looking at different kinds of women’s relationships with men. The titles are chosen from a longlist nominated by the more than 300 writer members of the Folio Academy, with the shortlist chosen by a panel of judges headed by novelist Tessa Hadley.
“The books under consideration are all nominated by writers, and so the quality of the work is very high,” said Hadley. “So many good books, prose fiction and poetry and nonfiction – so difficult to weigh one against another. We all brought certain passions to the table when we met.”
Hadley, who is joined on the judging panel by the poet Rachel Long and travel writer William Atkins, said that just a few books had “seized” judges from the first page: “[They] hadn’t let us down until the last, and then seemed even richer and larger on a second reading.”
The eight titles were whittled down from the 20-strong longlist which was announced alongside the finalists. It included Sally Rooney’s third novel Beautiful World, Where Are You and Emily Ratajkowski’s memoir My Body.
The winner will be announced on 23 March, in a ceremony at the British Library.
The shortlist in full:
Assembly by Natasha Brown (Hamish Hamilton)
The Promise by Damon Galgut (Chatto & Windus)
Men Who Feed Pigeons by Selima Hill (Bloodaxe)
Albert and the Whale by Philip Hoare (4th Estate)
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber)
My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley (Granta)
China Room by Sunjeev Sahota (Harvill Secker)
The Magician by Colm Tóibín (Viking)
The other longlisted titles:
Checkout 19 by Claire Louise Bennett (Cape)
Everybody by Olivia Laing (Picador)
Sea State by Tabitha Lasley (4th Estate)
Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen (4th Estate)
My Body by Emily Ratajkowski (Quercus)
Notes on the Sonnets by Luke Kennard (Penned in the Margins)
The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh (John Murray)
A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib (Allen Lane)
Amnion by Stephanie Sy-Quia (Granta)
A Year in the New Life by Jack Underwood (Faber)
