My Booker shortlist days are gone, says Rushdie

For Booker <g data-gr-id="28">Prize winning</g> author Salman Rushdie, chances of being shortlisted for the prestigious literary award are virtually over as young writers are now being preferred over “established names”.

The Mumbai-born and New York-based author, who won the Booker Prize in 1981 for ‘Midnight’s Children’ and was also awarded the “Booker of Bookers” which marked the 25th anniversary of the award in 1993, said judges seem to favour newer and younger authors.

Rushdie was short-listed a record three times in 1983 for ‘Shame’, in 1988 for ‘The Satanic Verses’, and in 1995 for ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’.

‘Shalimar The Clown’ reached the longlist in 2005, and ‘The Enchantress of Florence’ in 2008.

“I have not been on a Booker Prize shortlist for 20 years, so those days are gone,” he told an audience at the annual Cheltenham Literature Festival in south-west England on Saturday.

“If you look at the list this year, other than Anne Tyler there seems to be a desire to move away from established names. No Ishiguro, no Atwood, no Franzen. Certainly Jonathan’s book (Purity) has been astonishingly well-received.

If they’re trying to favour new voices, younger writers, then fair enough, why not,” he pointed out.

The Booker Prize for 2015, which has Indian-origin British author Sunjeev Sahota in the running along with five other international authors, will be announced at a ceremony in London’s Guildhall on Tuesday night.

The author, who was born in Derbyshire in the East Midlands region of England to Punjabi migrants, is among the favourites to win this year for ‘The Year of the Runaways’, which traces a year in the lives of four young migrants from India struggling to make a living in England.

Others in the running include Jamaica-born Marlon James’ ‘A Brief History of Seven Killings’, Londoner Tom McCarthy’s ‘Satin Island’, Nigeria-born Chigozie Obioma’s ‘The Fishermen’, Los Angeles author Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘A Little Life’, and Minnesota-born Anne Tyler s ‘A Spool of Blue Thread’.