With the lost Man Booker Prize (1970) going to J G Farrell for Troubles, attention is firmly back onto the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2010. With the prize down to its shortlist of 6, all eyes are fixed on Tuesday 12th October, when the 2010 winner will be announced.
The Shortlist includes:
Peter Carey - Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber) – Tales of American adventure
Emma Donoghue - Room (Picador - Pan Macmillan) – Ma and 5 year old Jack’s quest to escape from the clutches of Old Nick
Damon Galgut - In a Strange Room (Atlantic Books - Grove Atlantic) – Disastrous journeys
Howard Jacobson - The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury) – Friendship, trials and tribulations
Andrea Levy - The Long Song (Headline Review - Headline Publishing Group) – Slavery in the last days of slavery
Tom McCarthy - C (Jonathan Cape - Random House) – Technology, war and the 1920s
If Peter Carey is successful, he will become the first writer to have won the prize on three separate occasions, having already won with Oscar & Lucinda in 1988 and True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001.
J G Farell’s Troubles was unanimously voted the winner of the lost 1970 Man Booker Prize for Fiction with 38%. Although, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), the second book from Trouble’s Empire trilogy, picked up the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1973, so I doubt J G Farrell holds too much of a grudge for the 40 year wait.
