LGBTs in the Man Booker Long-List

Photo: Colm Toibin

Sorry Yankees, you're not eligible to for the Man Booker Prize, a fiction award open to writers from Britain, Ireland, and the Commonwealth. The list has good cred nevertheless: Iris Murdoch, Salman Rushdie, A.S. Byatt, and Margaret Atwood have been past winners.

Among the 13 authors who have been announced as finalists, we know that several of them are LGBT. Out Irish author Colm Toibin's book The Testament of Mary (which he adapted to a play that was recently produced on Broadway starring Fiona Shaw) is on the list; he'd been previously nominated. Other nominated books by LGBT authors include Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson, and The Kills by Richard House.

The rest of the final 13 are:

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

Harvest by Jim Crace

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman by Eve Harris

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

Unexploded by Alison MacLeod

TransAtlantic by Colum McCann

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan

Have we missed any other LGBT people from that list?

The winner, announced October 15, wins a PS50,000 prize and bragging rights.