Odds stacked against US novelists Joshua Ferris and Karen Joy Fowler, as shortlisted authors wait for announcement of winner
The US novelists Joshua Ferris and Karen Joy Fowler will have to beat the odds if one of them is to become the first American winner of the Man Booker prize, to be announced on Tuesday night in London.
For the first time, the £50,000 prize is open to any author writing originally in English and published in the UK, but Ferris’s book, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, described as a New York tale of existential dentistry, and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Fowler, a tale of family life where a psychologist father twins his daughter with a chimp, are the bookmakers’ outsiders.
Previously, the prize was open to authors from the UK and Commonwealth countries, the Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe, but the organisers decided to throw it open for 2014 after 45 years.
Announcing that decision, Jonathan Taylor, chairman of the Booker Prize Foundation, said: “We are embracing the freedom of English in its versatility, in its vigour, in its vitality and in its glory, wherever it may be. We are abandoning the constraints of geography and national boundaries.”
The favourite to accept the award from the Duchess of Cornwall at the Guildhall in London is Neel Mukherjee, the Indian-born Briton, for The Lives of Others, his story of family life set in Kolkata, the city of his birth
For the first time, the £50,000 prize is open to any author writing originally in English and published in the UK, but Ferris’s book, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, described as a New York tale of existential dentistry, and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Fowler, a tale of family life where a psychologist father twins his daughter with a chimp, are the bookmakers’ outsiders.
Previously, the prize was open to authors from the UK and Commonwealth countries, the Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe, but the organisers decided to throw it open for 2014 after 45 years.
Announcing that decision, Jonathan Taylor, chairman of the Booker Prize Foundation, said: “We are embracing the freedom of English in its versatility, in its vigour, in its vitality and in its glory, wherever it may be. We are abandoning the constraints of geography and national boundaries.”
The favourite to accept the award from the Duchess of Cornwall at the Guildhall in London is Neel Mukherjee, the Indian-born Briton, for The Lives of Others, his story of family life set in Kolkata, the city of his birth
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