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| Man Booker prize nominee Colm Tóibín |
Colm Tóibín and Jim Crace
on Man Booker prize shorlist
The six-strong
shortlist for the UK’s best-known literary award, the Man Booker prize for
fiction, was announced on Tuesday. In a group notable for its geographic
diversity, four women and two men will compete for the £50,000 prize, awarded
on October 15 in London.
Eleanor Catton,
a New Zealander, is the youngest author on the list. Shortlisted for her 800
page, Victorian-style second novel, The Luminaries, Ms Catton will be 28 when the winner is
announced.
The only debut
fiction to make the final six comes from US-resident Zimbabwean NoViolet
Bulawayo, 31, forWe Need New Names, the tale of a girl’s life in an African
shanty town and subsequent exile in America.
The others on
the list are The Lowland, by US-based writer Jhumpa
Lahiri, which follows two Calcutta-born brothers, and the Canadian writer Ruth
Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, a novel that links the
lives of a lonely Canadian woman and a Japanese teenager.
The early
favourites to win, however, are the two men on the list: veteran English writer
Jim Crace for his 11th book, Harvest, a bleak story of
dispossessed peasants in an unnamed feudal village; and Colm Tóibín for The
Testament of Mary, a retelling of Jesus’s life from his mother’s point of view
– at 101 pages by some distance the shortest book chosen. Colm Tóibín has been
shortlisted twice before (in 1999 and 2004) and Jim Crace once, in 1997.
The five-strong
judging panel read 152 novels submitted by publishers, and whittled the
contenders down to six from a longlist of 13 books announced in July.
Chairman of the
judges, the writer and academic Robert Macfarlane, said this year’s panel was
“drawn to those novels that extend the power and possibility of the form”. Each
of the six shortlisted titles, he said, was chosen for displaying “style,
verve, experimentation”.
The linking
theme in this group of books, Mr Macfarlane said, “is connection – ways of
connecting, and inevitably also about connection’s dark reverse. These novels
are all about the strange ways people are drawn together, and the . . . ways they are torn apart.”
Winning the Man
Booker award guarantees a sales boost: the 2012 prize went to Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies, the second in a projected
trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell and the court of King Henry VIII. The
first book in the series, Wolf Hall, won the 2009 Man Booker prize, and the two
titles have sold a combined 1.5m copies.
There’s no
obvious similar blockbuster title on the 2013 shortlist, nor are there any
books from very small publishing houses. In 2012, three of the final six came
from very small imprints, which saw sales rocket after Man Booker recognition.
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