Six titles made the shortlist for this year's Booker Prize for Fiction, one of the most prestigious prizes for English-language literature. This year's finalists were chosen from 158 novels published in the U.K. or Ireland between October 1, 2020, and September 30, 2021. The 2021 winner, who will receive £50,000, will be announced on November 3 in an award ceremony held in partnership with the BBC.
The 2021 shortlist is as follows:
- A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam (Hogarth)
- The Promise by Damon Galgut (Europa)
- No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead)
- The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed (Knopf)
- Bewilderment by Richard Powers (W. W. Norton)
- Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead (Knopf)
Three of these finalists are American. Patricia Lockwood is a debut novelist, and this is Damon Galgut's third time and Richard Powers's second time making the shortlist. Penguin Random House is the publisher of four titles.
"Perhaps appropriately for our times," said chair of the 2021 judges Maya Jasanoff, "these novels share an interest in how individuals are both animated and constrained by forces larger than themselves."
