FUN, EVEN IF HE'S PIPPED AT THE POST

- story from Sydney Morning Herald

As a New Zealander, a rugby fan and the author of The Book of Fame - an award-winning account of the first All Blacks team to tour Britain - Lloyd Jones knows that being the bookmakers' favourite means nothing until you're actually carrying the World Cup aloft.
So the fact his acclaimed novel, Mister Pip, is the 2-1 favourite to win tomorrow's $120,000 Man Booker prize - ahead of On Chesil Beach by the former winner Ian McEwan - hasn't gone to the 52-year-old's shaven head.

"I don't take very seriously being the bookmakers' favourite," Jones says on the phone from Berlin, where he has a writer-in-residence posting. "If one of the judges came out and said, 'We think Lloyd Jones is the favourite', then I would.
"But I'm pleased [the bookmakers] are part of the mix, because it adds to the fun. The Booker breaks out of the world of books into a wider world where even bookmakers feel free to make a judgment."

He is right to be cautious. Bookmakers aren't noted for being keen readers of literature. And they certainly got it wrong before the original shortlist of 12 was reduced to six. Then, William Hill bookmakers made McEwan the 3-1 favourite and Jones the rank outsider at 20-1.
Since the All Blacks crashed out of the rugby union World Cup quarter-final in Wales, Kiwis have been looking for something positive. Does he feel the weight of a nation on his shoulders?
"God, put like that, it's a bit much," he laughs. "I don't feel any pressure at all. If, on Tuesday, I was suddenly being entered into a writing competition where I had to sit down in the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff and do a two-hour composition against five other authors, I'd be nervous.

"But the job's already done. I can't do any more. I won't feel disappointed if I don't win. The fact Mister Pip has been shortlisted is surely an accomplishment."
It has been 22 years since another New Zealander, Keri Hulme, won the award with The Bone People. There is more interest in the Man Booker than there was in Hulme's day, and there's talk of Mister Pip becoming New Zealand's biggest international seller.

Not bad for a story set in the 1990s in war-torn Bougainville, where the last white man on the island, Mr Watts, reads Charles Dickens's Great Expectations to schoolchildren, firing the imagination of young Matilda, the novel's narrator.
Much of Jones's research was conducted as a freelance journalist while on assignment in Bougainville for magazines, including Good Weekend.

Perhaps for that reason, he rejects the description "author", preferring the term "writer" ("Author is such an old-fashioned term. It immediately conjures up an image of some bloke in a smoking jacket and a pipe.")

The straight talker also admits the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, which Mister Pip won this year, should have more prestige than the more lucrative, better- publicised Man Booker.
One is open to all the books published in the Commonwealth, while the other is open only to Commonwealth authors whose books have been published in Britain.

Not that he will be protesting if he beats the other novelists.

The other shortlisted books are On Chesil Beach; Darkmans, by Nicola Barker; The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid; The Gathering, by Anne Enright; and Animal's People, by Indra Sinha.
But, no, Jones hasn't got a speech prepared. Perhaps that was the All Blacks' mistake.