The new Man Booker prize – the international version, since the normal version bars all authors outside the British Commonwealth, has announced its shortlist. And with the caliber of writers on the list, judging the winner will not be a matter of parsing levels of talent – everyone on the list has plenty of that – but will rather be more ideological and political (Cynics will argue that’s every award, which is only true to some extent). For example, the last prize, in 2005, which was also the inaugural prize, passed up authors such as John Updike, Margaret Atwood and Gunter Grass in order to publicize the lesser known Albanian author Ismail Kadaré.
Here’s the list of fifteen authors who made it for 2007:
Chinua Achebe
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Peter Carey
Don DeLillo
Carlos Fuentes
Doris Lessing
Ian McEwan
Harry Mulisch
Alice Munro
Michael Ondaatje
Amos Oz
Philip Roth
Salman Rushdie
Michel Tournier
With the award pot hovering at $130,000, it’d be a nice windfall for anyone.
Also, in other award-ish news, Cormac McCarthy just won the Pulitzer prize for fiction for The Road.
The book certainly deserves it – it’s one of the most harrowing
yet stylistically beautiful books I’ve read in near memory, and it’s
received near universal critical acclaim.
