The Booker Shortlist buzz
Now that David Mitchell has failed to make it to the Booker 2006 shortlist, Sarah Waters becomes the uniform favourite. The shortlist itself is very interesting because none of the shortlisted authors are previous winners and except for Waters (Fingersmith 2002), no other author had made it to the shortlist earlier.
Snippets from some news items on the shortlist:
CBC Canada:
Literary experts were surprised that several heavyweights, such as previous winners Peter Carey and Barry Unsworth, were left off the list.BBC UK:
But Kiran Desai is the daughter of Indian novelist Anita Desai - previously shortlisted on three occasions.Reuters calls it a shock Booker shortlist.
Hisham Matar is the only first-time novelist to make the cut. His novel, In the Country of Men, tells the story of a young boy growing up in Libya under Colonel Gaddafi.
Book chain Waterstone's expressed surprise that Mitchell did not make the final list with his rites-of-passage novel Black Swan Green.
Bloomberg calls the excluded a long and starry list of omissions.
The Independent's summing up borrows John Sutherland's phrase and calls it a turning of literary tide.
Nearly all the favourites to win this year's £50,000 Man Booker Prize have fallen at the penultimate fence after the judges chose one of the youngest and most eclectic shortlists in years.
...
The selection surprised commentators. John Sutherland, last year's chairman and author of How to Read a Novel, said it was a "bizarre" list that might signal a changing of the literary guard. "If you compare it with last year, the average age is five or 10 years younger. What we may be seeing is a turning of the tide, the older generation giving way to the new."
The buzz will get louder.
