Judges for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction announced

www.themanbookerprize.com

The judging panel for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is announced today, Wednesday 9 December 2009. The judges are Rosie Blau, Literary Editor of the Financial Times; Deborah Bull, formerly a dancer, now Creative Director of the Royal Opera House as well as a writer and broadcaster; Tom Sutcliffe, journalist, broadcaster and author and Frances Wilson, biographer and critic. Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate, was announced as Chair of the Judges in November. Andrew Motion photo by Johnny Ring.

Ion Trewin, Literary Director of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, comments, ‘In choosing the judges we strive for imagination, enthusiasm, devotion to duty and integrity. I feel confident that the 2010 team not only ticks all these boxes but, from what promises to be another high quality year for fiction, will deliver a winning choice worthy of what we expect from the award of the Man Booker Prize.’

The winner of the 2009 prize, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, was chosen from 132 entries. The judges said, ‘Wolf Hall has a vast narrative sweep that gleams on every page with luminous and mesmerising detail.’ It has now sold over 150,000 copies in the UK and the rights have been sold for publication in 23 languages.

The longlist, ‘The Booker Dozen’ – the 12 (or 13) titles under serious consideration for the prize – will be announced in late July and a shortlist of six books will be announced in early September. The Man Booker Prize 2010 winner announcement will be broadcast by the BBC from London’s Guildhall at an awards ceremony on Tuesday 12 October 2010.
The Judges

Andrew Motion is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London and co-founder of the online Poetry Archive. He was Poet Laureate from 1999 until earlier this year. He has received numerous awards for his writing. His group study, The Lamberts, won the Somerset Maugham Award and his authorised life of Philip Larkin won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. Andrew Motion was knighted for his services to literature in 2009.

Rosie Blau is Literary Editor of the Financial Times. Educated at Cambridge and Harvard, she has been a journalist for the past decade, writing for a variety of publications in the UK and US. She joined the Financial Times in 2003 and has worked as a columnist, arts editor and news editor.

Deborah Bull was a dancer and is now Creative Director of the Royal Opera House as well as a writer and broadcaster. She danced with The Royal Ballet from 1981 to 2001, the last 10 years as Principal Dancer. Deborah’s books include a diary, Dancing Away. For three years she contributed a weekly column to the Daily Telegraph. She has broadcast regularly, including the landmark series for BBC2, The Dancer’s Body, in 2002. She was a member of Arts Council England between 1998 and 2005 and served as a Governor of the BBC between 2003 and 2006. In 1999 she was awarded a CBE.

Tom Sutcliffe is an author, broadcaster and journalist. He studied English at Cambridge before joining the BBC where he has since presented A Good Read, Saturday Review and Round Britain Quiz. He was editor of Kaleidoscope, Radio Four’s long-running predecessor to Front Row. He helped launch The Independent newspaper as its arts editor and still writes for the paper as a television reviewer and columnist. A BBC 2 series, Watching, was based on his book about cinema.

Frances Wilson has a PhD in Henry James and lectured in English Literature for 15 years before becoming a freelance writer. She is author of Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers; The Courtesan's Revenge: Harriette Wilson, the Woman who Blackmailed the King and The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. She was a judge for the Whitbread Biography prize in 2005 and reviews for the Sunday Times and the Times Literary Supplement. She is currently writing a biography of J Bruce Ismay, chairman of the company that owned the ill-fated trans-Atlantic liner, the ‘Titanic’.