The books chosen by the panel are those that have made a personal impact on them, and are divided into 10 categories. These include "love, sex and romance", which features titles ranging from Jilly Cooper’s Rivals to Judy Blume’s Forever; "identity", which moves from Toni Morrison’s Beloved to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth; and "adventure", which includes Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.
Like the rest of the Orwell prize shortlist, Milkman has a theme rather than an agenda. Always capacious, the genre of political fiction can now accommodate authors such as Ali Smith, Rachel Kushner, Paul Beatty and Jonathan Coe. As George Orwell wrote: "No book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." Much harder to find, however, is an example of what one might call the campaigning novel: that subset that includes classics by the likes of Charles Dickens and Émile Zola alongside fiction-cloaked manifestos, memoirs and works of reportage.
The superhero film, which Coogler co-wrote with Joe Robert Cole, had already outsold Captain America: Civil War to become Marvel’s most-preordered film in its first 24 hours after release. In Black Panther, T’Challa, played by Chadwick Boseman, returns home as king to a fictional African nation known as Wakanda, but finds his rule challenged by a long-time adversary in a conflict that has global consequences.