Man Booker longlist includes Anne Enright, Andrew O’Hagan, Anna Smaill

The Man Booker longlist has been announced and there are a few surprises in there — not to mention surprise omissions.

The Chimes, by Anna Smaill

This is the first chance I’ve had to catch up with the Man Booker Prize longlist, which has its share of surprises.

For example, I would have bet on Kazuo Ishiguro making the cut for The Buried Giant. A few of my other predictions (floated here a fortnight ago) did come to pass, notably Irish author and previous winner Anne Enright for The Green Road, Marilynne Robinson for Lila and her Hawaiian-born compatriot Hanya Yanagihara for A Little Life. I also picked Nigeria’s Chigozie Obioma for his debut The Fishermen and expressed hope Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan would be included for The Illuminations. There are no Australians on the longlist, but there’s still a chance this part of the world will complete a hat-trick, with Auckland poet and writer Anna Smaill in contention for her debut novel The Chimes. Smaill, 35, will be hoping to emulate the success of fellow Kiwi Eleanor Catton (The Luminaries) and Tasmania’s Richard Flanagan (The Narrow Road to the Deep North).

Smaill’s immediate response to her longlisting was succinct: “Bloody hell,’’ she wrote on Twitter. In subsequent media interviews the sentiment was the same but more genteelly expressed. “Before the nomination, the Booker seemed an unassailable idea,’’ she told The Independent. “My first reaction was, how can I possibly be on the list with these writers I have idolised? Marilynne Robinson is somebody I adore and admire endlessly. Processing that will take a while.”

The other longlisted novels are Did You Ever Have a Family, the debut of American literary agent Bill Clegg; A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James, the first Jamaican author to be in Booker contention; The Moor’s Account, by Moroccan-American writer Laila Lalami; Satin Island, by British novelist Tom McCarthy; Sleeping on Jupiter, by Indian author Anuradha Roy; The Year of the Runaways, by British-Indian writer Sunjeev Sahota; A Spool of Blue Thread, by veteran American novelist Anne Tyler, who like Robinson, is a Pulitzer prize-winner. Big-name authors who had eligible books but missed out included previous winners Ishiguro, Peter Carey, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood. Nor did Jonathan Franzen or Harper Lee trouble the scorer. However, Americans do dominate the longlist, in this second year of the Booker being open to all comers writing in English, accounting for five of the 13 works. The shortlist for the £50,000 ($107,000) prize will be announced on September 15.

Congratulations to Felicity Plunkett, a valued contributor to these pages, on being longlisted for the biennial Montreal International Poetry Prize, which is for a single unpublished poem of no more than 40 lines and is worth $C20,000 ($20,800). Plunkett, poetry editor at UQP, is longlisted for a poem titled What the Sea Remembers. She is one of seven Australian poets in contention, and even though it’s a long longlist of 50 or so poems, all of which will be published in an anthology, that still seems impressive. The others are Kevin Brophy, Lisa Jacobson, Ron Pretty, John Stokes, Jessica Wilkinson and Jena Woodhouse. Good luck to all. The winning poem will be announced in December. The inaugural prize, in 2011, went to Australian poet Mark Tredinnick and in 2013 the winner was Canadian poet and actress Mia Anderson.

Quote of the week: “I only know that the Aussies have done a tremendous job of pacifying Phuoc Tuy province, which was one of the most peaceful in Vietnam before they got here and doesn’t seem any worse since they arrived, which is a f..king outstanding success for any military program.’’

Well, it’s a quote I read only this week, from the American protagonist of Mark Dapin’s riotous new novel R&R, a work that reminds me of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and which Gerard Windsor reviews this week.