Section:GDN 1N PaGe:9 Edition Date:190724 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 23/7/2019 20:09 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
Wednesday 24 July 2019 The Guardian •
9David BarnettAlthough the trailer for the film
adaptation of Cats divided the internet
when it was released last week, TS
Eliot would likely have approved of the
“rich strangeness” that has disturbed
so many, according to his estate.
Thomas Stearns Eliot wrote the
poems that form Old Possum’s Book
of Practical Cats in the 1930s, on
which both Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
stage musical and Tom Hooper’s
forthcoming fi lm are based. Hooper’s
fi lm stars a host of big names such as
Dame Judi Dench, Taylor Swift and
James Corden , but when the trailer
was released on Thursday, many
people were horrifi ed at the singing
human-cat hybrids, based on Eliot’s
feline characters Macavity, Bustopher
Jones and Rum Tum Tugger.
Clare Reihill , who administers the
Eliot estate, said: “I think Eliot might
have enjoyed the rich strangeness of
the blurring of the boundary between
human and cat in the trailer, which is
in keeping with the elusiveness of the
world of the poems”.‘Strange’ Cats trailer
would appeal to
TS Eliot, says estate
attempting to cross into the US. Just
one debut is nominated, from the
youngest writer in the lineup: 31-year-
old Nigerian-British author Oyinkan
Braithwaite’s darkly comic thriller My
Sister, the Serial Killer. The judges said
it was “as skilful, sharp and engaging
a debut as any fi rst novelist can pro-
duce”, packed with prose “as pointed
as a lethal weapon”.
All 13 books are “credible winners”,
according to Florence. “They imagine
our world, familiar from news-cycle
disaster and grievance, with wild
humour, deep insight and a keen
humanity,” he said. “These writers
off er joy and hope. They celebrate the
rich complexity of English as a global
language. They are exacting, enlight-
ening and entertaining.”
The longlist was chosen from 151
novels. Alongside Florence, the jurors
were: Liz Calder , former publisher and
editor; novelist Xiaolu Guo ; writer
Afua Hirsch ; and musician Joanna
MacGregor. Gaby Wood, literary direc-
tor of the Booker prize foundation ,
said they had also called in young adult
novels and “books that are sometimes
dismissed as commercial”.
The prize is supported for the fi rst
time this year by Crankstart, a charita-
ble foundation run by Michael Moritz
and his wife Harriet Heyman , rather
than the Man Group.
The shortlist will be announced on
3 September and the winner revealed
at a ceremony in London on 14 October.The 13 contenders
The Testaments Margaret
Atwood (Vintage,
Chatto & Windus)
Night Boat to Tangier
Kevin Barry (Canongate )
My Sister, the
Serial Killer
Oyinkan Braithwaite
(Atlantic Books)
Ducks, Newburyport
Lucy Ellmann
(Galley Beggar Press)
Girl, Woman, Other
Bernardine Evaristo
(Hamish Hamilton)
The Wall John Lanchester
(Faber )
The Man Who
Saw Everything
Deborah Levy
(Hamish Hamilton)
Lost Children Archive
Valeria Luiselli (4th Estate)
Lanny Max Porter ( Faber)
An Orchestra of
Minorities
Chigozie Obioma
(Little Brown)
Quichotte Salman
Rushdie (Jonathan Cape)
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This
Strange World Elif Shafak (Viking)
Frankissstein Jeanette Winterson
(Jonathan Cape) Jeanette
Winterson is
on the list for
Frankissstein, a
re-interpretation
of Frankenstein‘Spoiler
discretion
prevents any
description
of who,
how, why
and even
where’Peter Florence
Chair of judges▼ The Nigerian-British novelist
Oyinkan Braithwhaite features on
the longlist for her darkly comic
novel My Sister, the Serial Killer▲ Salman Rushdie, a former winner
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