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Robert
Macfarlane (left,credit Angus Muir) is today, Wednesday 21 November 2012, named as chair of the judges
for the 2013 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, the most prestigious award for
fiction written in English. Having been on the judging panel in 2004, he will
now lead a panel of five judges in choosing the best book of the year.
Robert Macfarlane comments:
‘I feel very proud indeed to be
chairing this prize, which has done so much to shape the modern literary
landscape. I look forward greatly – with, it’s true, a dash of trepidation - to
the 40,000 or so pages of reading that my fellow judges and I have ahead of
us.’
Robert
Macfarlane is a Fellow in English at Cambridge University, specialising in
contemporary literature, and is well-known both as a critic and writer. He
writes regularly on literature, travel and nature for The Guardian and Granta
Magazine, among other publications.
He
is the author of a number of prize-winning, non-fiction books. Mountains of
the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003) won The Guardian First Book
Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and a Somerset
Maugham Award. The Wild Places followed in 2007 and was adapted for
television by the BBC. His latest book The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot (2012)
was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and The
Waterstones Book of the Year Award. He is currently writing a book called Underland,
about subterranean worlds.
The
longlist for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, ‘The Booker Dozen’ – the 12 or 13
titles under serious consideration for the prize - will be announced in July
2013. The shortlist of six titles will be announced in September. The winner of
the 2013 Man Booker Prize will be announced at London’s Guildhall at an awards
ceremony on 15 October 2013.
The winner of the 2012
Man Booker Prize for Fiction, Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
(Fourth Estate), made history when it was announced last month, making Hilary
Mantel the first woman and the first British author to win the prize twice. In
the week following the 2012 winner announcement, sales of Bring Up the Bodies
increased by 474%, whilst sales of Wolf Hall (the first in the trilogy
which won the prize in 2009) had increased by 707%.
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