The Gown Student Newspaper at Queen's University Belfast

ARTS: From Booker to Bookie

A short introduction to the Man Booker prize 2009

This year’s Man Booker Prize is something of a veteran’s game, with bestsellers Sarah Waters with ghost story The Little Stranger, Young Writer of the Year 2008 Adam Foulds with The Quickening Maze, novelist Simon Mawer with his The Glass Room, as well as previous winners J.M Coetzee and A.S. Byatt on the shortlist. Competition on both the long and shortlists for the popular literature prize was particularly stiff this year, where a number of former winners and previously shortlisted novelists again nominated for their work. Conspicuously, popular writers and three-time nominees William Trevor and Colm Toíbín have failed to make the shortlist with Love and Summer and Brooklyn respectively, making the prize Irish-writer-free. This is disappointing news, considering the strong winning history of writers from Ireland, with John Banville and Anne Enright both winning in recent years. This year, the focus is less on ‘beautiful’ prosy works than on those with a gripping story at the heart of the book.

Rionnagh Sheridan

The all-star writer J.M Coetzee, whose previous achievements include winning the Booker twice, in 1983 for The Life and Times of Michael K, and in 1999 for Disgrace, as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, has been shortlisted for a novel so new it hasn’t even been published yet. (Avid fans of Coetzee and those who attempt to read all longlisted novels will have to make do with the sweet snippet of Summertime audio available on the Booker website).

However, providing much Booker excitement this year is the novelist Hilary Mantel who along with A.S. Byatt for her novel The Children’s Book is a hot contender for the 2009 title. Mantel is not only slated by literary noses to scoop the £50,000 pound prize for Wolf Hall, but is also on track to win many a betting hound a few bob in the process. No, please do not adjust your spectacles or blink uncomprehendingly at the previous sentence. Odds on Mantel winning the prize are now 4/5 on William Hill, with whom I have impulsively but rather thrillingly placed my own bet online.

Betting, I have learned, is not all it seems-this is a surprising twist to a literary review, isn’t it? Possibly because I have in the past thought of bookies offices as places of broken dreams and wives’ despair, and of bettors as possessing a certain amount of unscupulousness, nastiness and corruption (and again with the wives’ despair). Plus ça change. Following my first trip to the Galway races where feathers shimmied and champagne flowed, and where I was within a helicopter’s downdraft of Ronnie Wood, the betting classes have been magically transformed into chic, well-heeled and exciting society. I am now convinced that it is my turn to make my fortune with a flutter, and it is definitely no coincidence that the Booker Prize claims to be the ‘world’s most important literary award [which] has the power to transform the fortunes of authors and even publishers….’ Hang on to your hats for the 6^th of October!

Tags: arts, Books, Reading

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Arts + Ents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.