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When Jonathan Escoffery learned his debut novel had been nominated for one of English literature’s most prestigious awards, he didn’t quite believe the news.
“It took me maybe a week to actually process. I was kind of in denial in a very serious way,” the Miami native says.
Escoffery’s novel If I Survive You, awarded “Best Book by a Local Author” by New Times earlier this year, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. One of the highest-profile literary awards in the world, the United Kingdom-based prize is given annually to one novel published that year in the UK from anywhere in the world, and even being shortlisted is considered a serious achievement. Escoffery didn’t even realize the book, which came out last September in the U.S., was eligible. He had forgotten the UK pressing had been released in February of this year.
“I’d received a lot of really good news about the book, award nominations. But this one, it really just dawned on me slowly that the nomination had happened, for one, and then what it means for the book, for my career, and how that opened up a kind of international audience that the book really hadn’t seen yet,” he adds.
Previous winners have included some literary titans: Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin, The Testaments), Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children), and Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day), to name a few. American authors have only been eligible since 2014, with only Paul Beatty and George Saunders taking home the prize. Escoffery is the first author from Florida to have been shortlisted, a milestone made more special by the personal, highly localized nature of his book.
Less a true novel than a series of narratively linked short stories, If I Survive You tells the story of Trelawny, a child of Jamaican-American immigrants living in Cutler Bay and elsewhere in South Florida, and the difficulties he faces, from Hurricane Andrew to the Great Recession. Light-skinned and mixed-race, Trelawny struggles to feel accepted anywhere, from Miami, where he’s an outsider as an Anglophone, to Jamaica, where he’s American, to his Midwestern college, where he’s Black. Reading the book, especially as a native South Floridian, one gets the sense that it could only have been written by someone who knows Miami inside and out – something that was intentional on Escoffery’s part.
“I wanted people to be able to immerse themselves in the world of Miami and see some of the stranger parts of it that I feel like I’ve witnessed, or in some cases lived through,” he says. “Having left and lived in various cities around the country, Miami is so distinct and so worthy of being captured in so many forms of media and art, but definitely in literature.”
While the book has also been favorably received in the U.S., where it was longlisted for a National Book Award, Escoffery admits its tale of post-colonial immigrants may have resonated distinctly in the UK, home to a sizeable and significant population of Jamaican and West Indian heritage. The island was a colony of the British Empire until its independence in 1962. The many Jamaicans who migrated to the UK after World War II in search of a better life faced prejudice and hardship, similar to the characters of If I Survive You.
Written partially in Jamaican patois, the book has also been favorably received among Jamaica’s literary community. Escoffery attended the Calabash Book Festival in the town of Treasure Beach in May and appeared on the morning TV news show Smile Jamaica! after the shortlist announcement. “When you’re someone who’s in the Jamaican diaspora, there’s always a kind of anxiety around whether you will actually be embraced by people in Jamaica. And I think some of those anxieties are shown in the book. But it’s been very well received in Jamaica,” he adds.
He also says the country’s community of “Bookstagrammers,” social media personalities who post about books and literature, have promoted and reviewed If I Survive You. “These are Jamaican readers who are trying to just make sure that Caribbean literature is being promoted and read and people have access to it because even that can be a difficult thing. From my perspective, people sometimes ask me, where exactly do I get the book in Jamaica? And I don’t always have an answer to that,” Escoffery says.
Escoffery is one of two debut novelists shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, the other being Londoner Chetna Maroo. Only six debut novels have ever won the prize, the most recent being Scottish writer Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain in 2020. The prize was first awarded in 1969; this year’s winner will be announced on Sunday, November 26, in London.
If I Survive You. By Jonathan Escoffery. MCD Books. 2022. 272 pages. Hardcover, $27. Paperback, $18.
