Esi Edugyan and Adjoa Andoh are among the judges of the Booker Prize 2023 announced on December 13, 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, and Damon Galgut.
The 2023 cycle of the prize started when they announced the judging panel of the award which will be chaired by Novelist Esi Edugyan who has twice-shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The judging panel will be looking for the best work of long-form fiction, selected from entries published in the UK and Ireland between October 1 2022 and September 30 2023. She will be joined on the panel by Adjoa Andoh, actor, writer and director. Other judges are Mary Jean Chan, poet, lecturer, editor and critic; James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and author specialising in Shakespeare; and actor and writer Robert Webb.
Edugyan said on the selection, ‘Stendhal wrote: “A novel is a mirror carried along a high road.” Year after year the Booker Prize encourages us to take sight of ourselves in the lives of others, to slip for the length of a story into different skins, to grapple with unfamiliar worlds that allow us to see our own afresh. I’m deeply excited for the chance to immerse myself in great storytelling, in its enduring ability to shock, thrill, devastate, and console. I am especially delighted to get to do so alongside this brilliant and accomplished panel of judges, whose breadth of experience, viewpoints and vocations will no doubt make for rich conversation.’
Here is more information about two of the judges;
Esi Edugyan
Esi Edugyan, Chair of 2023 Booker Prize judges, is the internationally bestselling author of Washington Black, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Literary Excellence, among others – and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Adjoa Andoh
Adjoa Andoh is one of Britain’s leading actors, winning global acclaim as Lady Danbury in the hit Netflix series Bridgerton – a role that saw her nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress at the 2021 NAACP Image Awards.
The ‘Booker Dozen’ of 12 or 13 books will be announced in July 2023 with the shortlist of six books to follow in September. The winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced in the Autumn of 2023.
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