The longlist for the 2021 Booker Prize has been announced! The Booker Prize is the has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over 50 years. It is awarded annually to the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.

Below are the 13 longlisted titles:

• A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam

• Second Place by Rachel Cusk

• The Promise by Damon Galgut

• The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris

• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

• An Island by Karen Jennings

• A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson

• No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

• The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed

• Bewilderment by Richard Powers

• China Room by Sunjeev Sahota

• Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

• Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

Maya Jasanoff, chair of the 2021 judges, says of the longlist: ‘One thing that unites these books is their power to absorb the reader in an unusual story, and to do so in an artful, distinctive voice. Many of them consider how people grapple with the past — whether personal experiences of grief or dislocation or the historical legacies of enslavement, apartheid, and civil war. Many examine intimate relationships placed under stress, and through them meditate on ideas of freedom and obligation, or on what makes us human. It’s particularly resonant during the pandemic to note that all of these books have important things to say about the nature of community, from the tiny and secluded to the unmeasurable expanse of cyberspace.’

The shortlist of six books will be announced on Tuesday 14 September. You can find out more about the Booker Prize longlist here.