Longlist for 2023 Booker Prize includes four Irish authors

This year's Booker prize longlist for best novel published in the UK and Ireland includes four Irish authors.

Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, Paul Lynch's Prophet Song, Elaine Feeney's How to Build a Boat, and Sebastian Barry's Old God's Time have all made this year's longlist.

A shortlist of six books will be released on November 26, and the winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced at an event in Old Billingsgate, London on September 21.

The Booker Prize was created in 1969 and takes submissions from authors living across the UK and Ireland.

Since its founding, there have been two Booker winners from Scotland and one from Wales.

Ireland has the largest literary presence of the Celtic nations, with Iris Murdoch in 1978, Roddy Doyle in 1993, John Banville in 2005, and Anne Enright in 2007.

Belfast-born Anna Burns is the most recent winner from the island, with Milkman in 2018.

This year's list includes authors originally from Malaysia, Canada, Kenya and Nigeria.

The judges this year, led by Chair Esi Edugyan, include a mix of creative talents.

Adjoa Andoh is best known for her role as Lady Danbury in Bridgerton. Comedian and actor Robert Webb of That Mitchell and Webb Sound also played Jeremy Osbourne on Channel 4's Peep Show.

Writer and journalist James Shapiro has been nominated for a number of literary prizes over his career and now serves on the Board of Directors for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Authors Guild.

Poet Mary Jean Chan has won a number of poetry awards in addition to judging the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation in 2019 and 2020, the Jhalak Prize and the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prizes in 2022.