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.