The mother of which booker prize winner has also been shortlisted for the booker prize

Marie C. Bolden made national headlines when she turned in a flawless performance at a spelling bee in Cleveland. Her competitors included white students from segregated school districts in the South. Courtesy the Brown Family If you haven't heard about the Black girl who won the first national spelling bee in the U.S. 115 years ago, you're not alone: even many in her family didn't know about Marie C. Bolden's feat until after she died, decades later. "It's astounding to me" that she never talked about winning a gold medal in front of thousands of people, Bolden's grandson, Mark Brown, told NPR. But back in 1908, Bolden's victory made national news and upended racist stereotypes, less than 50 years after the Civil War. The 14-year-old did it by being perfect, spelling 500 words flawlessly to lead her hometown team, Cleveland, Ohio, to victory in the city's then-new Hippodrome Theater. "She never talked about this award, this amazing accomplishment," Brown said. "But even Booker T. Washington mentioned [it] in his speeches." Bolden's win was a national sensation Boleden's win was dramatic and unprecedented: Cleveland's team was trailing in a field that included teams from New Orleans, Pittsburgh and Erie, Pa., near the end of the contest, according to contemporary accounts. But then Bolden vaulted her team to the top prize. "When I felt nervous at the Hippodrome, it steadied me to think of these things," she was quoted telling The Plain Dealer. "I just kind of gritted my te...

The 2021 winner, The Promise details the interconnected relationships between the members of a diminishing white South African family through the sequential lens of four funerals, with The Guardian describing Galgut as ‘a vital, nuanced chronicler of the deep hurts of South Africa, past and present’ when reflecting on his win. The morning after the announcement, the book was number one on Amazon’s bestseller chart. Two weeks after the win, Chatto & Windus announced that it had reprinted 153,000 copies of The Promise, having sold 23,878 copies in hardback, 14,622 of which sold in the two weeks following the news, a 1,925% jump in volume compared with the two weeks before. As part of a series for the Booker website, shortlisted writers choose a book from the Booker Library that has had a profound impact on them. Richard Powers reaches out of his comfort zone to pick up Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, which, when he finally puts it down, leaves him ‘a different kind of reader’. With so many ambitious and intelligent books before us, the judges engaged in rich discussions not only about the qualities of any given title, but often about the purpose of fiction itself. We are pleased to present a shortlist that delivers as wide a range of original stories as it does voices and styles. ‘This year, over the course of nine largely solitary months, five strangers of disparate backgrounds showed each other what they saw in stories—what dazzled them or challenged them, what touched the...