So the Longlist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize has been announced. We discussed various literary prize winners in my writing class a while ago, questioning our teacher (who's been on a few judging panels) on how judgement is arrived at and what criteria is involved.
From what I can gather, it ultimately comes down to some vague and intangible sense of 'which one everyone liked most'. Hmm. The last few 'prize winning' books I've read - primarily out of curiosity over what makes an award winning story - were, with the exception of Wolf Hall
, fairly underwhelming. Always fun to look through the list though. Here it is.
PS. Just a note - if The Slap wins the Booker Prize I will throw up.
Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America
(Faber and Faber) Emma Donoghue, Room
(Pan MacMillan - Picador) Helen Dunmore, The Betrayal
(Penguin - Fig Tree) Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room
(Grove Atlantic - Atlantic Books) Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question
(Bloomsbury) Andrea Levy, The Long Song
(Headline Publishing Group - Headline Review) Tom McCarthy, C
(Random House - Jonathan Cape) David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
(Hodder & Stoughton - Sceptre) Lisa Moore, February
(Random House - Chatto & Windus) Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
(Penguin - Hamish Hamilton) Rose Tremain, Trespass
(Random House - Chatto & Windus) Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap
(Grove Atlantic - Tuskar Rock) Alan Warner, The Stars in the Bright Sky
(Random House - Jonathan Cape)
2 comments:
There is so much expectation for a Booker Prize winner to be fantastic that it can't help but be a let-down most of the time. Having said that some of my favourite books (kerri hulme's "the bone people" and "the god of small things" by arundhati roy) have won the prize so i guess it come down to 'which one i liked the most'!
How do WE get onto the judging panel Eva?!
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