Indian-origin author Avni Doshi’s debut novel on Booker Prize shortlist

Dubai-based Indian-origin writer Avni Doshi’s debut novel Burnt Sugar, published in India as the

Girl in White Cotton

, is one of the six books shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction 2020. The winner will be announced on November 17.


The shortlist, selected from 162 submitted books, includes four debut novels. Besides Burnt Sugar, the shortlisted novels are Diane Cook’s The

New Wilderness

, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body, Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain and Brandon Taylor’s Real Life. The shortlisted authors will receive £2,500 each, while the winner will be awarded £50,000.

The shortlist was selected by a panel of five judges: editor, literary critic and former publisher Margaret Busby, author Lee Child, author and critic Sameer Rahim, writer and broadcaster Lemn Sissay, and classicist and translator Emily Wilson.

“The novels on this year's shortlist range in setting from an unusual child growing up in working-class Glasgow in the 1980s, to a woman coping with a post-colonial nightmare in Zimbabwe. Along the way we meet a man struggling with racism on a university campus, join a trek in the wilderness after an environmental disaster, eavesdrop on a woman coping with her ageing mother as they travel across India and in an exploration of female power discover how ordinary people rose up in 1930s Ethiopia to defend their country against invading Italians. It’s a wondrous and enriching variety of stories, and hugely exciting as well,” said Margaret Busby, chair of the 2020 judges.

Doshi was born in New Jersey and now lives in

Dubai

. Set in Pune, the novel explores the complex relationship between a mother and daughter under the shadow of

dementia

.