Man Booker shortlist reveals few surprises

The eagerly awaited shortlist for 2009’s Man Booker Prize was announced on Tuesday September 8th and there was plenty to excite the press, with two previous winners (A.S. Byatt and J.M. Coetzee) in the shortlist, along with an author who has twice been nominated for both the Booker and Orange prizes (Sarah Waters).

Most of the excitement revolves around South African, J.M. Coetzee’s chance of being the first author to win the prize three times (he was the victor firstly in 1983 with Life & Times of Michael K and secondly in 1999 with his excoriating view of post-apartheid South Africa, Disgrace), yet Hilary Mantel seems set to be the bookies’ favourite, while Welsh author, Sarah Waters, outsells all the other shortlisted authors.

The final nominees are: The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt, Summertime by J.M. Coetzee, The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, The Glass Room by Simon Mawer and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.

Wolf Hall, a gripping historical novel set in the court of Henry VIII received some glowing critical reviews, while A.S. Byatt (a winner with Possession in 1990) and J.M. Coetzee are revered for the consistently high quality of their prose. Adam Foulds is better known as a poet and has chosen to construct his novel around the meetings of two other poets, John Clare and Alfred Tennyson at a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest. Simon Mawer has set his novel in 1930s Czechoslovakia.

Sarah Waters is probably the most commercial author in the shortlist. She has seen three of her novels (Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith) adapted for television and the film rights for The Little Stranger have recently been purchased by the company responsible for the movie version of John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener.

Literary commentators are predicting a split between the literary and the popular novel, while Boyd Tonkin of The Independent commented that for the most part the Man Booker judges have decided to take a literary staycation. This is in contrast to the Booker’s reputation for normally favouring Commonwealth writers and exotic settings, such as last year’s winner, Aravind Adiga and his novel The White Tiger, which was set in Bangalore and Delhi.

www.themanbookerprize.com

New post on at Thursday, 1 October, 2009, 7:11 am and is archived in Culture, Lifestyle. Subscribe to answers with RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.