ON SEPTEMBER 15th the shortlist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize for fiction was announced from a longlist of 13. The six books are tough, but also hopeful and diverse. The authors include two Americans, two Brits, a Nigerian and, for the first time in the prize’s history, a Jamaican. They range in age from 28 to 73, and list includes both a debut novel—“The Fishermen” by Chigozie Obioma—and a 20th—Anne Tyler’s “A Spool of Blue Thread”.

This is only the second year that the prize was open to any books written originally in English; previously it had been restricted to writers from Britain, Ireland, the Commonwealth and Zimbabwe. Fears that the prize would be overrun by American authors have so far proved unfounded. More.

See: The Economist

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