Word travel with Steve Toltz
Alison Flood writing in guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday October 08 2008

Steve Toltz is jetlagged, and he looks it. Rumpled hair, half-open eyes, and the occasional inability to find the right vocabulary all bear testament to the rigours of the Australia-to-London flight he took yesterday, in order to make it to the UK in time for next week's Booker circus.
He doesn't seem particularly well prepared for the media attention coming his way, and makes a song and dance over reading an extract from the book, variously standing up and down, cricking his back, rushing to the loo and fumbling over words.

"Look, until I finished the book I'd never been to a book reading and I never quite understood it, it seemed a bit odd to me why you'd want to hear an author reading his book," he says. "I have not read out loud to anyone over the age of five, ever, so just thought it was a bit odd."

Toltz is uncomfortable with the idea of nationality, so he probably wouldn't want to hear that he is your typical Antipodean traveller, laid back, scruffy, lethargic and prone to beginning a lot of sentences with "Look".

Yes, he's excited to be shortlisted for the Booker but on this sunny Tuesday the 36-year-old not exactly animated about it. "Look, it's funny," he says. "There is an element of arbitrariness about it, only because you know that in a different year five different judges would pick six different books."

Read the complete piece about the Aussie novice contender for the Man Booker Prize at the Guardian online.