The Booker Prize Snub episode

In this episode, Andrea and Annabelle are joined by Mazen Nahawi, enthusiastic reader and Founder and CEO of media intelligence firm CARMA, here to add some intelligence to the conversation about one of the highest profile snubs this year. 

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is no stranger to the Booker Prize, having won the award in 1989 for The Remains of the Day, and let’s not forget, a whole raft of other awards including the Nobel Prize and an OBE. 

After the longlist was announced in July, Ishiguro was a joint favourite to win with his latest book, Klara and The Sun, and looked like a clear shoo-in for the shortlist. But he was snubbed, pipped to the post by Damon Galgut's The Promise, Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle, Richard Powers' Bewilderment, Anuk Arudpragasam's A Passage North, Nadifa Mohamed's The Fortune Men, and Patricia Lockwood's novel No one is Talking About This.

Books and authors in this episode:

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

About us:

Andrea Gissdal is the Head of Communications and Marketing for the Emirates Literature Foundation. From a voracious and indiscriminate reader as a child, to a part time bookseller as a student, as an adult she has become a literary omnivore but with a preference for fiction. She also dabbles in creative writing, and has a penchant for Scrabble.

Annabelle Corton is the English Programme Manager at the Emirates Literature Foundation. She runs the Festival Book Club and has a background in guesting and presenting on talk radio shows about various literary topics. She likes words like ‘equinox’ and ‘vespa’, and loves a good pun. She’ll read anything in reach, but has a fondness for witty tussles of good vs. evil on page and screen, especially vampire fiction where a great deal is at stake. Get it? Stake? ….She’s not sorry.