Booker Longlist Announced

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction longlist was announced yesterday. The prize, set up in 1969, celebrates the best fiction, written in English, from the Commonwealth - ie pretty much anyone who writes in English but it not American. The list consists of 17 books, whittled down from 109, and will be further reduced to the shortlist of 6 on September 8th. The winner, who will receive 50,000 pounds, will be announced October 10th.

This year's list is quite strong featuring 4 previous winners (Ian, McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, JM Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie - Coetzee is the only person to have won twice and Rushdie won the "Booker of the Bookers" for the best of all novels that have won), some well known names, and a few more obscure authors. A conspicuous absence among the 17 are Canadians: there isn't a Canuck on the longlist, which I think is now two years in a row.

Currently the favourites are McEwan for "Saturday" and Ishiguro for "Never Let Me Go", but don't count out the others as the Booker often picks the wildcard or oddball of the group. Of all the books on the list, I am most interested in Zadie Smith's "On Beauty" (not released in Canada until September). I really enjoyed her first two novels - "White Teeth" and "The Autograph Man" - so I am looking forward to this one which, by its longlist endorsement, should meet the high standards of her previous work.

For brief descriptions of the 17 books and details about the prize and what the bookies are saying, see The Guardian.
rgsc