# Big Jubilee Read

The Big Jubilee Read is a 2022 campaign to promote reading for pleasure and to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II. A list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, 10 from each decade of Elizabeth II's reign, was selected by a panel of experts and announced by the BBC and The Reading Agency on 18 April 2022.

## Selection process

An initial long-list was compiled from readers' suggestions, and a panel of librarians, booksellers and "literature specialists" made the choice of 70 titles, aiming "to engage all readers in the discovery and celebration of great books". The project received funding from the Arts Council and is supported by Libraries Connected and the Booksellers Association.
The organisers hope that the project will "celebrate the joy of reading and the power that it has to connect people across the country and among nations". Nineteen of the books are winners of the Booker Prize. Most of the books are novels written in English, but there are also poetry collections such as Death of a Naturalist and short story collections including The Boat, while One Moonlit Night was published in Welsh as Un Nos Ola Leuad, Le Procès-Verbal and Our Lady of the Nile were originally in French, and Shuggie Bain is in English but with dialogue in Scots.

## The list

The list was published by the BBC on 18 April 2022.
| Title | Author | Year | Country (as stated in official list) |
| The Palm-Wine Drinkard | Amos Tutuola | 1952 | Nigeria |
| The Hills Were Joyful Together | Roger Mais | 1953 | Jamaica |
| In the Castle of My Skin | George Lamming | 1953 | Barbados |
| My Bones and My Flute | Edgar Mittelholzer | 1955 | Guyana |
| The Lonely Londoners | Sam Selvon | 1956 | Trinidad and Tobago England |
| The Guide | R. K. Narayan | 1958 | India |
| To Sir, With Love | E. R. Braithwaite | 1959 | Guyana |
| One Moonlit Night | Caradog Prichard | 1961 | Wales |
| A House for Mr Biswas | V. S. Naipaul | 1961 | Trinidad and Tobago England |
| Sunlight on a Broken Column | Attia Hosain | 1961 | India |
| A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess | 1962 | England |
| The Interrogation | J. M. G. Le Clézio | 1963 | France Mauritius |
| The Girls of Slender Means | Muriel Spark | 1963 | Scotland |
| Arrow of God | Chinua Achebe | 1964 | Nigeria |
| Death of a Naturalist | Seamus Heaney | 1966 | Northern Ireland |
| Wide Sargasso Sea | Jean Rhys | 1966 | Dominica Wales |
| A Grain of Wheat | Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o | 1967 | Kenya |
| Picnic at Hanging Rock | Joan Lindsay | 1967 | Australia |
| The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born | Ayi Kwei Armah | 1968 | Ghana |
| When Rain Clouds Gather | Bessie Head | 1968 | Botswana South Africa |
| The Nowhere Man | Kamala Markandaya | 1972 | India |
| Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | John Le Carré | 1974 | England |
| The Thorn Birds | Colleen McCullough | 1977 | Australia |
| The Crow Eaters | Bapsi Sidhwa | 1978 | Pakistan |
| The Sea, the Sea | Iris Murdoch | 1978 | England |
| Who Do You Think You Are? | Alice Munro | 1978 | Canada |
| The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams | 1979 | England |
| Tsotsi | Athol Fugard | 1980 | South Africa |
| Clear Light of Day | Anita Desai | 1980 | India |
| Midnight's Children | Salman Rushdie | 1981 | England India |
| Schindler's Ark | Thomas Keneally | 1982 | Australia |
| Beka Lamb | Zee Edgell | 1982 | Belize |
| The Bone People | Keri Hulme | 1984 | New Zealand |
| The Handmaid's Tale | Margaret Atwood | 1985 | Canada |
| Summer Lightning | Olive Senior | 1986 | Jamaica |
| The Whale Rider | Witi Ihimaera | 1987 | New Zealand |
| The Remains of the Day | Kazuo Ishiguro | 1989 | England |
| Omeros | Derek Walcott | 1990 | Saint Lucia |
| The Adoption Papers | Jackie Kay | 1991 | Scotland |
| Cloudstreet | Tim Winton | 1991 | Australia |
| The English Patient | Michael Ondaatje | 1992 | Canada Sri Lanka |
| The Stone Diaries | Carol Shields | 1993 | Canada |
| Paradise | Abdulrazak Gurnah | 1994 | Tanzania England |
| A Fine Balance | Rohinton Mistry | 1995 | India Canada |
| Salt | Earl Lovelace | 1996 | Trinidad and Tobago |
| The God of Small Things | Arundhati Roy | 1997 | India |
| The Blue Bedspread | Raj Kamal Jha | 1999 | India |
| Disgrace | J. M. Coetzee | 1999 | South Africa Australia |
| White Teeth | Zadie Smith | 2000 | England |
| Life of Pi | Yann Martel | 2001 | Canada |
| Small Island | Andrea Levy | 2004 | England |
| The Secret River | Kate Grenville | 2005 | Australia |
| The Book Thief | Markus Zusak | 2005 | Australia |
| Half of a Yellow Sun | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | 2006 | Nigeria |
| A Golden Age | Tahmima Anam | 2007 | Bangladesh |
| The Boat | Nam Le | 2008 | Australia |
| Wolf Hall | Hilary Mantel | 2009 | England |
| The Book of Night Women | Marlon James | 2009 | Jamaica |
| The Memory of Love | Aminatta Forna | 2010 | Sierra Leone Scotland |
| Chinaman | Shehan Karunatilaka | 2010 | Sri Lanka |
| Our Lady of the Nile | Scholastique Mukasonga | 2012 | Rwanda |
| The Luminaries | Eleanor Catton | 2013 | New Zealand |
| Behold the Dreamers | Imbolo Mbue | 2016 | Cameroon |
| The Bone Readers | Jacob Ross | 2016 | Grenada |
| How We Disappeared | Jing-Jing Lee | 2019 | Singapore |
| Girl, Woman, Other | Bernardine Evaristo | 2019 | England |
| The Night Tiger | Yangsze Choo | 2019 | Malaysia |
| Shuggie Bain | Douglas Stuart | 2020 | Scotland |
| A Passage North | Anuk Arudpragasam | 2021 | Sri Lanka |
| The Promise | Damon Galgut | 2021 | South Africa |

### Commonwealth nations by number of books

Where an author is given two countries of origin in the above list, 0.5 is given to each country.
| Country | Books | Population (millions, 2022) |
| England | 11 | 68 |
| Australia | 7.5 | 26 |
| India | 7 | 1,417 |
| Canada | 5 | 39 |
| Scotland | 3.5 | 5.5 |
| Jamaica | 3 | 3.0 |
| New Zealand | 3 | 5.1 |
| Nigeria | 3 | 218 |
| Sri Lanka | 2.5 | 22 |
| Guyana | 2 | 0.8 |
| Trinidad and Tobago | 2 | 1.4 |
| Wales | 1.5 | 3.2 |
| Grenada | 1 | 0.1 |
| Saint Lucia | 1 | 0.2 |
| Barbados | 1 | 0.3 |
| Belize | 1 | 0.4 |
| Northern Ireland | 1 | 1.9 |
| Singapore | 1 | 5.6 |
| Rwanda | 1 | 14 |
| Cameroon | 1 | 28 |
| Malaysia | 1 | 33 |
| Kenya | 1 | 57 |
| Bangladesh | 1 | 169 |
| Pakistan | 1 | 231 |
| Dominica | 0.5 | 0.1 |
| Mauritius | 0.5 | 1.3 |
| Botswana | 0.5 | 2.3 |
| Sierra Leone | 0.5 | 8.4 |
| Ghana | 0.5 | 33 |
| Tanzania | 0.5 | 64 |
| France | 0.5 | 66 |
* ↑ Not a Commonwealth nation.

## Omissions and other issues

Commentators discussed several omissions of potential titles: J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (ranked number 1 in the 2003 The Big Read); J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books; Terry Pratchett's Discworld series; Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook; and the work of Dick Francis, reportedly one of the Queen's favourite authors. The inclusion of Northern Irish writer Seamus Heaney was explained by the fact that when he wrote Death of a Naturalist he was living in the UK and published by an English publisher; Heaney identified as an Irish nationalist and had previously objected to his inclusion in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry.
In The Telegraph, Allison Pearson called it a "'You'll take your medicine and like it' kind of list compiled by people who were scared stiff of not being diverse enough." Similarly, in The Article, David Herman complained: "If you like Hornblower or James Bond, witches and hobbits, great children's literature, popular poetry or drama, The Big Jubilee Read doesn't care. What it does care about is post-colonial, ideally non-white, literature."