Alain Mabanckou was revealed to be one of the judges for the Booker Prize for Fiction 2022 on Tuesday, January 11, 2022.
The Booker Prize for Fiction, founded in 1969, is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the United Kingdom. Some of the previous winners of African descent have been Marlon James, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, Ben Okri, Bernadine Evaristo while Damon Galgut.
The 2022 cycle for the prize is already upon us as the judges chaired by Cultural historian, writer and broadcaster Neil MacGregor were revealed on Tuesday. They are academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari; historian Helen Castor; novelist and critic M. John Harrison; and novelist, poet and professor Alain Mabanckou.
Those who follow the literature from African will be familiar with Alain Mabanckou who grew up in Pointe-Noire, Republic of Congo, and studied law in Brazzaville and Paris. His first novel was published in 1998, and since then he has published regularly, writing novels, essays, and poetry, and becoming one of the best-known novelists in France.
His work has won many prizes, including the Renaudot Prize for Memoires of a Porcupine in 2006, and his novel Broken Glass was ranked by the Guardian as one of the 100 best books of the 21st century. He has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize twice: once in 2015, when the prize was for a body of work, and once in 2017 for a single novel, Black Moses.
In 2002 he became writer-in-residence at Ann Arbor, Michigan, before being hired in 2006 by the University of California at Los Angeles. He has translated works from English into French, including Beasts of No Nation by the Nigerian-American novelist Uzodinma Iweala (later adapted into a film by Cary Joji Fukunaga). Alain Mabanckou is now a full Professor of Literature at UCLA.
Those who want to enter can submit their work between January 31 and April 4, 2022. You can get more information about entering by clicking here.
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