‘The ultimate prize to win in the
English speaking world’
JM Coetzee
Today, Wednesday 23 July 2014, marks a historic moment
for the Man Booker Prize, as it announces its first global longlist.
For the first time in its 46 year history, the
£50,000 prize has, in 2014, been opened up to writers of any nationality,
writing originally in English and published in the UK. Previously, the
prize was open to authors from the UK & Commonwealth, Republic of Ireland
and Zimbabwe.
A touchstone for quality literary
fiction
First awarded in 1969, the prize is recognised as the
touchstone for high quality literary fiction written in English. Its canon
contains many of the literary trailblazers of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries: from Salman
Rushdie to Hilary
Mantel, Iris Murdoch to Peter
Carey.
The rules of the prize changed at the end of 2013, to
embrace ‘the freedom of English in all its vigour, its vitality, its
versatility and its glory wherever it may be’, opening up to writers beyond the
UK and Commonwealth.
2014 Man Booker Dozen
154 books were entered for this year’s prize by UK
publishers, of which 44 titles were by authors who are now eligible under the
new rule changes. Commonwealth submissions totalled 31 for this year, as
compared with 43 in 2013.
The 2014 longlist, or Man Booker ‘Dozen’, of 13
novels, is:
Author
(nationality)
Title
(publisher)
Joshua Ferris
(American)
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (Viking)
Richard Flanagan
(Australian) The Narrow Road to the Deep North
(Chatto & Windus)
Karen Joy Fowler
(American) We Are All Completely Beside
Ourselves (Serpent's Tail)
Siri Hustvedt
(American)
The Blazing World (Sceptre)
Howard Jacobson
(British) J
(Jonathan Cape)
Paul Kingsnorth
(British)
The Wake (Unbound)
David
Mitchell (British)
The Bone Clocks (Sceptre)
Neel Mukherjee
(British)
The Lives of Others (Chatto & Windus)
David Nicholls
(British)
Us (Hodder & Stoughton)
Joseph O'Neill
(Irish/American) The Dog (Fourth Estate)
Richard Powers (American)
Orfeo (Atlantic Books)
Ali
Smith (British)
How to be Both (Hamish Hamilton)
Niall Williams (Irish)
History of the Rain (Bloomsbury)
This year there are four independent publishers on the
list, of which one (Unbound) is a crowd-funded publisher.
Chair of the 2014 judges, AC
Grayling, comments on behalf of the panel:
‘This is a diverse list of ambition, experiment,
humour and artistry. The novels selected are full of wonderful stories and
fascinating characters.
‘The judges were impressed by the high quality of
writing and the range of issues tackled - from 1066 to the future, from a PoW
camp in Thailand, to a dentist’s chair in Manhattan; from the funny to the
deeply serious, sometimes in the same book.’
Shortlist and winner announcements
The 2014 panel of judges will decide the shortlist
later this summer. In addition to AC Grayling, they include: Jonathan
Bate; Sarah
Churchwell; Daniel
Glaser; Alastair
Niven and Erica
Wagner.
The shortlist of six books will be announced on Tuesday
9 September at a press conference at the London offices of Man Group, the prize’s sponsor.
The 2014 winner announcement will then be broadcast by
the prize’s broadcasting partner, the BBC, from London’s Guildhall on
Tuesday 14 October, during a black-tie dinner bringing together the
shortlisted authors, sponsor and well-known names from the literary world.
Winning the Man Booker Prize
The shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 and a
specially bound edition of their book. On winning the Man Booker Prize, an
author will receive a further £50,000 and can expect overnight fame and
international recognition, not to mention a significant increase in book sales.
In a discussion with the 2013 Chair of judges, Robert Macfarlane, 2013 winner Eleanor
Catton said on winning the prize:
Following her second win in 2012, Hilary Mantel topped
the UK Official Top 50 with the sales of Bring
up the Bodies, her sequel to Wolf
Hall which won in 2009. Sales of her winning novels together exceeded a
million copies in their UK editions. Theatre adaptations by the Royal
Shakespeare Company of both novels have been widely praised, and the BBC is now
preparing television adaptations. These are not the only winning novels to have
gone on to have second or third lives as stage and screen adaptations; other
famous examples include Schindler’s
Ark (directed by Steven Spielberg as Schindler’s
List), The Remains
of the Day and The
English Patient.
Changes to prize rules in 2014
This year’s rule changes see the prize abandoning
geographical constraints so that all authors writing in English are eligible.
On the changes, Salman Rushdie commented: ‘I think it's a really great thing
that finally we've got an English-language prize that doesn't make a
distinction for writers who are writing from a particular country.’
Other changes include the number of books a publisher
can submit, based on their success in longlists over the previous five years.
Chairman of the Booker Prize Foundation, Jonathan
Taylor, said: ‘Our new model, in recognising literary achievement, should
encourage the traditional publishing houses while ensuring novels from new
green-shoot publishers continue to be included.
‘By including writers from around the world to compete
alongside Commonwealth and Irish writers, the Man Booker Prize is reinforcing
its standing as the most important literary award in the English-speaking
world.’
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