The Booker Prize 2021 Shortlist Readings Event

We’ve been busy attending bookish events again. This week we went to the Booker Prize shortlist readings at the Southbank Centre (we love a shortlist reading evidently!). We heard each of the shortlisted authors read a little passage from their novels and then answer a few questions. 

The Southbank centre often has really cool events, and this one was the final part of the London Literature Festival - if you’re looking for more bookish events to attend, it’s worth keeping your eye on the Southbank centre. They are now live streaming a lot of their events too, so super accessible for those who can’t get to London. A side note, we were also super impressed by the accessibility of the event, they had closed captions and somebody signing too. 

The best thing about these events is listening to the work in the author’s own voice and having the opportunity to hear more about how and why they created the stories they did. During the event, Richard Powers said some profound things about how stories can - and do - make real change, Patricia Lockwood said she’d be a martyr to save us all from the internet and pretty much all the authors told us where their Mums were (not all of them in the audience). 

We were frantically writing things down throughout the event and here’s some of our favourite quotes:

“Literature is a complex way of answering problems”

Anuk Arudpragasam

“The absence of voice can also be powerful”

Damon Galgut

“Your attention in one sense is your most precious part of you”

Patricia Lockwood 

“I don’t think you can tell a story with one single voice”

Nadifa Mohamed

“Life is something we need to stop correcting”

Richard Powers

“How do you live life as a woman in 1914 when what you want is freedom? It’s impossible”

Maggie Shipstead

The winner is announced tonight and we’re really excited to see who will take the prize this year. We’ve only read one of the shortlist so far (I know, we’re terrible but we do intend to read them all at some point, also hardbacks guys if you know you know) so we can’t exactly say who we want to win but we are really excited to find out (and then proceed to read that book first probably).