This year’s finalists for the Moore Prize are a diverse set of works that attest, individually and collectively, to the resilience of the human spirit and value of human dignity when these are most imperiled. Our imaginations are challenged and our capacities for empathy and sympathy enlarged in unexpected ways by reading these imaginative and ambitious writers.

Five books have been short-listed for consideration for the Moore Prize’s Literature Award. A summary of the books by the Chairperson of the judging panel is supported by all of the judges.

Ants Among Elephants by Sujatha Gilda

This memoir, about the situation of Dalits in India, as told across the complex terrain of both family life and political strife, is unflinching in its exposures and revelations about what it means to seek a voice and place in a world seemingly long-since-set on denying that to you and yours.

Kingdom Cons by Yuri Herrera

This novel, about the ways in which an ordinary life can be taken up into extraordinary situations, is a provocative, energetic, and even at times entertaining account of the brutalities and injustices of daily life in a Mexico ruled by dictatorial drug lords.

Malacqua by Nicola Pugliese

This novel, about what happens when ecological disaster both forces and invites you to a fresh reckoning with the world around, is set in a Naples that is at once viscerally real and magically other. The novel questions our sense of reality and reveals the stakes of human life in its dependencies on the natural world.

Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan

This novel, about the situation of South Asian workers in the contemporary Middle East, is bleak and punishing in what it shows us about these lives, and yet it inspires a strange, unsettling, even funny strength of spirit in us by revealing the very same in them.

Welcome to Lagos by Chibundu Onuzo

This novel, about a group of young people in contemporary Lagos, reveals how hard it is to do the good in a setting that encourages the opposite. Friendship, loyalty, and sacrifice prove more powerful than temptations to power and greed.

The winner for the 2018 Moore Prize for Literature will be announced on November 30, 2018. The winner of the Prize receives £1,000 and a certificate.

The Moore Prize was established to encourage original, creative, and courageous writing of fiction and non-fiction about the relationship of power to the lives of ordinary citizens in all parts of the globe; and to encourage authors to investigate and analyze the causes of conflict, abuse and violation of human rights.

The 2018 Moore Prize’s distinguished panel of judges:

Randy Boyagoda (Chair of Panel) is a Canadian writer, intellectual and critic best known for his novels Governor of the Northern Province (2006) and Beggar’s Feast (2011) and his biography of

Richard John Neuhaus (2015). He is a member of the University of Toronto’s English Department served as the President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017.

Carmen Boullosa has had established a reputation as one of Mexico’s most admired writers. Her work examines issues of feminism and gender roles within a Latin American context. She has won a number of awards for her works. She has taught at universities such as Georgetown University, Columbia University and New York University (NYU), the City College of New York and Blaise Pascal University in Clermont Ferrand, France.

George Fetherling one of Canada’s most prolific persons of letters, who has written or edited more than fifty books, including a dozen volumes of poetry, four book-length fictions, and a two-volume memoir.

Contact: Daniel Vaver, Director, Christopher G. Moore Foundation

Email: dv@cgmoorefoundation.com