UWindsor creative writing alumnus Robin Robertson (MA 1979) has had his debut novel short-listed for one of the world’s leading literary awards.

The Long Take, a cinematic story of a postwar loner in urban America, told partly in poetry, is one of six works in consideration for the Man Booker Prize. The winner, to be announced October 16, receives an award of £50,000.

Robertson’s novel follows a good man brutalized by war, haunted by violence and apparently doomed to return to it. Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can’t return home to rural Nova Scotia, and as he moves from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco readers witness a crucial period of fracture in American history.

The judges described it as a film noir on the page: “A book about a man and a city in shock, it’s an extraordinary evocation of the debris and the ongoing destruction of war even in times of peace.”

Robertson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has published five collections of poetry. His honours include the Petrarca-Preis, the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and all three Forward Prizes — for best poetry collection, best first collection, and best single poem.