This year’s shortlist for the Booker prize was announced last night. Our books editors are here to answer your questions about the contenders, the judges and literary fiction. senoj1 asks: To get down to the shortlist, how do the judges manage to read 163 novels in 180 days, and then make time to discuss their relative merits and whether a book should move forward or be dropped? It’s nearly a novel a day every day for 6 months, all done alongside jobs, family duties, and all of life’s other demands. Are the rest of us just mere amateurs? Willduff says: I wonder if this explains why such very slight - in every sense - novels like Orbital and Flesh won the past couple of years. The shortlist looks interesting, though. Justine: It’s a crazy job, but someone’s got to do it - and you only have to do it once. When I was on the judging panel in 2024, the year Orbital won, I took a sabbatical from work which helped and just made reading my number one priority for nine months – what a privilege! My day job is looking at novels and deciding what we should review and who we should send the book to so – uniquely – all that reading is what I feel I should really be doing every year anyway. What readers have in common is that the TBR pile never diminishes. Undeniably, Booker judging is a strange way to read – at great speed, and then repeatedly, up to three times at least for the shortlist – but it does mean you’re considering novels in the round, in a snapshot of the publishing year, in a really interesting and fertile way. I’ve been on judging panels where the books are shared out, so not everybody reads everything, and the Booker USP is definitely the fact that there are five minds directed on every submission. Continue reading...