The Sellout
, by Paul Beatty, is the 2016 winner of the Man Booker Prize, a leading literary award that has brought recognition, reward, and readership to outstanding fiction for over four decades. The book showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It is a biting satire about a young man’s isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court. The Sellout challenges the sacred tenets of the U.S. Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, a father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality.
Paul Beatty is a fifty-four year-old New York resident who was born in Los Angeles. He is the author of three novels – Slumberland, Tuff, and The White Boy Shuffle – and two books of poetry: Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce. He is also the editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor. Paul is the first American author to win the prize since Americans became eligible in 2014.
About the Man Booker Prize
The Man Booker Prize, first awarded in 1969, is recognized as the leading award for exceptional literary fiction written in English. Each prize has the power to transform the winner’s career. The Man Booker Prize and Man Booker International Prize are sponsored by Man Group and underscore the firm’s charitable focus on literacy and education and commitment to excellence and entrepreneurship.
This year’s shortlist includes books by British, American, Canadian, and British-Canadian writers. Past winners of the last four decades include literary giants such as Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Iris Murdoch, and JM Coetzee. Bookshare salutes the accomplishments of these talented writers, and you can read many of their books in Bookshare’s Man Booker Special Collection.
About Bookshare
Bookshare is the world’s largest online library of accessible ebooks for people with print disabilities. Through its extensive collection of educational and popular titles, specialized book formats, and reading tools, Bookshare offers individuals who cannot read standard print materials the same ease of access that people without disabilities enjoy. In 2007 and 2012, Bookshare received two five-year awards from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), to provide free access for all U.S. students with a qualifying print disability. The Bookshare library now has over 490,000 books and serves more than 400,000 members. Bookshare is an initiative of Benetech, a Palo Alto, CA-based nonprofit that develops and uses technology to create positive social change.
Benetech recently announced that over 10 million accessible ebooks have been downloaded through its Bookshare initiative. Learn more about this momentous milestone.
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