Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Man Booker 'shows contemporary fiction in vogue'

The 2014 Man Booker shortlist shows that “contemporary fiction is of the moment”, judge Sarah Churchwell told the announcement press conference this morning (9th September).

In recent years the prize has been awarded to a number of historical novels – 2013 winner The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton, is set in 1866, while Hilary Mantel’s 2012 winner Bring Up the Bodies revived scenes from the 1500s.

But this year’s shortlist of six contains novels that “are very engaged with the contemporary world”, said critic and professor Churchwell. Ali Smith’s How to be Both (Hamish Hamilton) is a dual narrative, with both a contemporary and an early Renaissance setting, while of the others – Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Chatto); Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (Chatto); Howard Jacobson’s J (Jonathan Cape); Joshua Ferris' To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (Viking); and Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Serpent’s Tail) – none are set before the 20th century.

Five of the six shortlisted books are published by Penguin Random House. But Ion Trewin, chair of the Booker Prize Foundation, [pictured] said that no generalisations should be made about the prize based on this year's list alone.

Speaking to The Bookseller, Trewin said that the make-up of publishers on the shortlist differed from year to year. “Whether it will change as we see publishing changes, I don’t think we can tell that yet,” he said. “What I really feel is that at the end of the day you cannot generalise from one year.”
One of the books which did not make the shortlist was David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (Sceptre), but Trewin said while booksellers would be talking about its absence, “the judges decided he wasn’t one of the six best” during their deliberations, which took three hours and 40 minutes.

Two Americans have made the shortlist – Fowler and Ferris – which shows that fears of American domination due to the Man Booker’s new rules were unfounded, said judge Alastair Niven, a Fellow of Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford.

He said following the announcement of the new rules he spoke to “umpteen” unhappy authors , whose main concern was that the Americans would “inundate” the prize. “We were not flooded with quality American writing to the detriment of anything else,” he said. “Any threat that American literature would inundate [the prize] has simply not come about.”

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