Judging panel announced
For the Man Booker International Prize 2007
The judging panel of the 2007 Man Booker International Prize is announced today, 1st June, 2006. Chaired by Professor Elaine Showalter, this eminent international panel consists of writer and novelist, Nadine Gordimer and writer and academic, Colm Toibin.
Ion Trewin, administrator of the prize, comments:
‘For our second Man Booker International Prize we have gone to three continents for our judges. Their depth of experience and international knowledge as practitioners or academics is in the best traditions of the Man Booker prizes.’
The Man Booker International Prize recognizes one writer for their achievement in fiction. Worth £60,000 to the winner, the prize is awarded once every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.
The winner is chosen solely at the discretion of the judging panel; there are no submissions from publishers. Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare won the inaugural prize in 2005 and went on to gain worldwide recognition for his work. In addition, there is a separate prize for translation and, if applicable, the winner can choose a translator of his or her work into English to receive a prize of £15,000.
The judges’ list of contenders, approximately fifteen writers under serious consideration for the prize, will be announced in Toronto in April 2007. The winner of The Man Booker International Prize 2007 will be announced in early summer 2007. The prize will be presented at an awards ceremony in Oxford, shortly after the winner is announced.
The prize is sponsored by the Man Group, which also sponsors the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
The Man Booker International Prize is significantly different from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it highlights one writer’s continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. Both prizes continue to strive for literary excellence.
The Judges
Elaine Showalter (Chair)
Dr. Elaine Showalter is Professor Emeritus of English and Avalon Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, where she taught courses on contemporary fiction, the American short story, and Victorian literature, and received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2003. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the University of California at Davis, she is the author or editor of eighteen books which include A Literature of Their Own (1977); These Modern Women: Autobiographies of American Women in the 1920s (1978); The New Feminist Criticism, (1985); The Female Malady: Women, Madness and Culture (1985); Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Creativity in the Fin-de-siècle (1990); Sister’s Choice: Traditions and Change in American Women’s Writing (1991); Hystories (1997); Inventing Herself (2001); Teaching Literature (2002); and Faculty Towers (2005). In addition, she has edited twenty reprints of literary texts, and has published over 100 articles on British and American literature. Her work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, German, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Russian, and Croatian.
Showalter has lectured widely in the US, UK, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, The Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Canada, and has written more than 200 book reviews for both scholarly journals and such periodicals as The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. In London she has appeared on BBC radio and television as a cultural commentator on literature, art, theatre, movies, and television. She has written for such diverse publications as Vogue, People, New Statesman, Prospect, and the British Medical Journal; served as a Phi Beta Kappa Fellow in 1993, and as president of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) in 1998. She has been a judge for the National Book Awards and the National Magazine Fiction Awards in the U.S., and the Orange Prize in the U.K. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.
In 2004-2005 Showalter was the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Research Fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, working on a literary history of American women writers to be published by Knopf in the U.S. and Little, Brown in Europe. Since 1972, she has spent part of every year in London; she and her husband English Showalter, Professor Emeritus of French at Rutgers University, now divide their time between homes in Washington, D.C. and London, where she is currently a Visiting Research Professor at Roehampton University. The Showalters have two children, Michael Showalter, an actor and film-maker, and Vinca LafLeur, a political writer and consultant.
Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer (born 20 November, 1923) is a South African novelist and writer. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991 and was the joint winner of the Booker Prize for The Conservationist in 1974. She has been awarded honorary doctorates from Oxford and Cambridge, is the vice-president of International PEN and a spokesperson for the United Nations Development Project to eradicate poverty.
A co-founder of the Congress of South African Writers, Nadine Gordimer is a strong advocate of literature and free speech. Her first book, The Lying Days, was published in 1953. She has been awarded numerous honorary degrees, as well as France’s Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She has also made a number of television documentaries and written a large collection of articles, literary criticism and speeches. She travels extensively in Africa, Europe, and North and South America.
Her most recently published collection of short stories is Loot and she is also the editor of Telling Tales, an anthology published to benefit AIDS charities in Southern Africa. Her novel, The Pickup (2001), was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the best book category for the 2002 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the Africa region. Her latest novel is Get A Life, published in November 2005.
Colm Tóibin
Colm Tóibin was born in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford in 1955 and educated at University College Dublin. He is the author of five novels: The South, (1990) winner of The Irish Times Literature Prize in 1991; The Heather Blazing, winner of the Encore Award for the best second novel in 1992; The Story of the Night (1997); The Blackwater Lightship (1999), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; and The Master (2004), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France.
His non-fiction work includes: Homage to Barcelona (1989), a travelogue; a selection of his journalism, The Trial of the Generals (1990); Walking Along the Border (1987); and The Sign of the Cross - Travels in Catholic Europe (1994).
Tóibin’s books have been translated into twenty-five languages. He is currently teaching at Stanford University.
