Lisa Moore is on the long list for the Man Booker Prize for February. Lisa Moore is on the long list for the Man Booker Prize for February. (Steve Carty/CBC)

St. John's writer Lisa Moore is one of 13 novelists on the list for the Man Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious English-language literary awards.

She is nominated for February, her fictional exploration of the impact on one family of the 1982 sinking of the oil rig Ocean Ranger. The Ocean Ranger disaster killed 84 men, most of them Newfoundlanders.

In an interview with Shelagh Rogers on CBC's The Next Chapter, Moore recalled being a teenager working in a restaurant the night the oil rig sank.

"To wake up the next morning and realize that men had disappeared — it was unthinkable ,it was the most heart-wrenching thing to imagine," Moore said. "Newfoundlanders have had that disaster in their hearts, had that disaster in their heads."

Her story centres on one of the widows, Helen, who is left with four children after the death of her husband.

"I was interested in how you hold on to someone that's died and how you let them go," Moore said.

February is Moore's second novel. Her first, Alligator, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Caribbean and Canada region and was nominated for the Giller Prize and the IMPAC award.

Moore writes for television, radio and newspapers, and has also published two collections of short stories, Degrees of Nakedness and Open.

Emma Donoghue, an Irish-born writer who now lives in Canada, is nominated for Room, a dark fairy tale about a mother and son who live inside a locked room.

The other contenders include a previous two-time winner, Peter Carey for Parrot and Olivier in America, a reimagining of Alexis de Tocqueville's famous journey to the New World. Australian-born Carey lives in New York.

Three of the nominated authors have previously been shortlisted for the prize — David Mitchell, who is nominated for The Thousand Autumns of Zacob de Zoet, Damon Galgut, nominated for In a Strange Room and Rose Tremain, nominated for Trespass.

The prize is worth £50,000, roughly $80,000.

The other nominees announced Tuesday are:

  • Helen Dunmore, Britain, The Betrayal.
  • Howard Jacobson, Britain, The Finkler Question.
  • Andrea Levy, Britain, The Long Song.
  • Tom McCarthy, Britain, C.
  • Paul Murray, Ireland, Skippy Dies.
  • Christos Tsiolkas, Australia, The Slap.
  • Alan Warner, Scotland, The Stars in the Bright Sky.

The Booker jury chooses a shorter list of six names by Sept. 7 before choosing a winner on Oct. 12.