Alumna Rachel Kushner '01 Shortlisted for 2018 Man Booker Prize

Fiction alumna Rachel Kushner '01 has been shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize for her novel The Mars Room.

“Kushner’s portrait of life inside the women’s prison is grainy and persuasive….Kushner smuggles her share of humor into these scenes. Like Denis Johnson in Jesus’ Son, a book this novel references, she is on the lookout for bent moments of comic grace…The Mars Room is a major novel, a sustained performance, one that broods on several exigent ideas…There have always been echoes of laconic but resonant writers like Robert Stone and Don DeLillo in Kushner’s prose. In The Mars Room, she dwells as well on Dostoyevskian notions of evil.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

The Man Booker Prize is the leading literary award in the English speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over four decades. Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK. It is a prize that transforms the winner’s career. The 2018 winner will be announced on Tuesday, October 16 in London’s Guildhall. The ceremony will be aired by the BBC.

Rachel Kushner is also the author of The Flamethrowers, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top Five Novel. Her debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book. A collection of her early work, The Strange Case of Rachel K, was published by New Directions in 2015. Kushner’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Paris Review. She is the recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2016 Harold D. Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received her MFA from Columbia University.