Image of six shortlisted authors

Man Booker Prize 2008 Shortlist Announced

Six shortlisted titles announced

Man Booker 2008 Shortlist Announced 

  • Two debut novelists
  • ‘intensely readable ... page-turning stories'
  • For the first time, extracts available to download onto mobiles

    • Aravind Adiga, Sebastian Barry, Amitav Ghosh, Linda Grant, Philip Hensher and Steve Toltz are the six authors shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2008, the English-speaking world's most important literary award. The shortlist was announced by the chair of judges, Michael Portillo, at a press conference at Man Group plc offices in London today (Tuesday 9th September 2008).

    The six shortlisted books were chosen from a longlist of 13 and are:

    Author                             Title                                          Publisher              

    Aravind Adiga               The White Tiger                                                Atlantic

    Sebastian Barry           The Secret Scripture                           Faber and Faber

    Amitav Ghosh              Sea of Poppies                                                John Murray

    Linda Grant                  The Clothes on Their Backs                 Virago

    Philip Hensher             The Northern Clemency                       Fourth Estate

    Steve Toltz                   A Fraction of the Whole                       Hamish Hamilton

    Michael Portillo, Chair of Judges, comments:

    "The judges commend the six titles to readers with great enthusiasm. These novels are intensely readable, each of them an extraordinary example of imagination and narrative. These fine page-turning stories nonetheless raise highly thought-provoking ideas and issues. These books are in every case both ambitious and approachable."

    The 2008 shortlist includes two first time novelists, Aravind Adiga and Steve Toltz. The six authors represent a broad geographical spread with two Indian authors, two English authors, an Australian author and an Irish author. The youngest on the list, at 34 years old, is Aravind Adiga. Sebastian Barry was shortlisted in 2005 for his novel A Long, Long Way, Linda Grant was longlisted in 2002 for her novel Still Here and Philip Hensher, once a Booker judge himself, was also longlisted in 2002 for his novel The Mulberry Empire.

    The winner receives £50,000 and can look forward to greatly increased sales and worldwide recognition. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, receives £2,500 and a designer bound edition of their own book.                                                                                                                        

    The judging panel for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is: Michael Portillo, former MP and Cabinet Minister; Alex Clark, editor of Granta; Louise Doughty, novelist; James Heneage, founder of Ottakar's bookshops and Hardeep Singh Kohli, TV and radio broadcaster.

    The winner will be announced on Tuesday 14th October at a dinner at the Guildhall, London.  The announcement will be broadcast live on BBC One's 10 O'Clock News.

    This year, the Man Booker Prize has exclusively partnered with mobile site GoSpoken to make extracts from the shortlisted books available to download free onto your mobile phone. They can either be read as text or listened to as audio. The extracts will be available from the moment the shortlist is announced by texting MBP to 60300.  This is the first time that any book prize has used mobile technology to promote its shortlist.

    On Monday 13th October, the eve of the winner announcement, the Southbank Centre in London will host an evening of readings and discussion with the 2008 shortlisted authors.                                   

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    The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

    Atlantic Books, £12.99

    Born in the heartland of India to the son of a rickshaw puller, Balram Halwai, the ‘White Tiger', dreams of escaping his life as a teashop worker turned chauffeur. Yet when his chance finally arrives and his eyes are opened to the revelatory city of New Delhi, Balram becomes caught between his instinct to be a loyal son and servant and his desire to better himself.  As he passes through two different Indias on his journey from the darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success, he begins to realise how the Tiger might finally escape his cage, and he is not afraid to spill a little blood along the way.

    Aravind Adiga was born in Madras on 23rd October 1974 and raised partly in Australia. He studied at Columbia and Oxford Universities and is a former correspondent for TIME magazine in India. Adiga's articles have also appeared in publications such as the Financial Times, Independent and Sunday Times. He currently lives in Mumbai.

    For further information or interview requests please contact:

    Karen Duffy on 020 7269 1621 or at KarenDuffy@groveatlantic.co.uk

    The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

    Faber and Faber, £16.99

    Roseanne McNulty, perhaps nearing her one-hundredth birthday - no one is quite sure - faces an uncertain future as the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. She talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene in the weeks leading up to the closure. Told through their respective journals, the shocking story of Roseanne's family in 1930s Sligo emerges. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland. The Secret Scripture is the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment yet marked by passion and hope.

    Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin on 5th July 1955. He has written a number of plays and his novels include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), Annie Dunne (2002) and A Long Long Way (2005) which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the Dublin International Impac Prize.  He has won, among other awards, the Irish-America Fund Literary Award, the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize, the London Critics Circle Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize. He currently lives in Wicklow with his wife and three children.

    For further information or interview requests please contact:

    Kate Burton on 020 7465 7554 or at Kate.burton@faber.co.uk

    Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

    John Murray, £18.99

    Set just before the Opium Wars, this novel has at its heart an old slaving-ship, The Ibis and its crew, a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts.  In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman. As their old family ties are washed away they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races and generations.    

    Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta on 11th July 1956 and grew up in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India. He studied at the universities of Delhi and Oxford. He has taught at a number of institutions, most recently Harvard, and written for many publications. His international bestseller, The Glass Palace was published in 2000. He currently divides his time between Calcutta, Goa and Brooklyn.

    For further information or interview requests please contact:

    Nikki Barrow on 020 7873 6440 or 07813 806 297 or at nikki.barrow@johnmurrays.co.uk

    The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant

    Virago, £17.99

    The Clothes on Their Backs is a story about concealed pasts, dark subjects, dark places and stark choices and how the clothes we wear define us all. In a red brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road, Vivien, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents. Through Vivien we discover the colourful characters at Benson Court, who play a part in the development of this at first timid and unworldly woman. Then, one morning, a glamorous older man appears, dressed in a mohair suit, with a diamond watch on his wrist and a girl in leopard-skin on his arm. He is her Uncle Sándor, but why is he so violently unwelcome in her parents' home?

    Linda Grant was born on 15th February 1951 in Liverpool and currently lives in London.  She is the author of several award-winning novels, including The Cast Iron Shore, published in 1996 and When I Lived in Modern Times, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her novel Still Here was longlisted for The Booker Prize in 2002. Other award-winning books include Remind Me Who I am Again, Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution and The People on the Street: A Writer's View of Israel.

    For further information or interview requests please contact:

    Susan de Soissons on 020 7911 8069 or 07887 991424 or at Susan.deSoissons@littlebrown.co.uk

    The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher

    Fourth Estate, £17.99

    1974. Husbands and wives, arm in arm, stroll through an invincible suburb after a summer party, secure and hopeful. Over the next twenty years everything will change for them, and for England.  Set in Sheffield, The Northern Clemency charts the relationship between two families: Malcolm and Katherine Glover and their three children; and their neighbours the Sellers family, newly arrived from London. The day the Sellers move in there is a crisis across the road: Malcolm Glover has left home, convinced his wife is having an affair. The consequences of this rupture will spread throughout the lives of both couples and their children, in particular 10-year-old Tim Glover, who never quite recovers from the moment of his mother's public cruelty and the amused taunting of 15-year-old Sandra Sellers. In the background England is changing: from a land of fire and industry to a gleaming landscape of shop fronts and chain restaurants, a shift particularly marked in the North with the miners' strike of 1984.

    A Booker judge himself in 2001, Philip Hensher has written five novels, Other Lulus, Kitchen Venom which won the Somerset Maugham Award, Pleasured, the Booker-longlisted The Mulberry Empire (in 2002) and The Fit, as well as a collection of short stories, The Bedroom of the Mister's House.  He is a columnist for The Independent, arts critic for The Spectator and a Granta Best of Young British Novelist. He was born on 20th February 1965 and lives in South London.

    For further information or interview requests please contact:

    Robin Harvie on 020 8307 4146 or 07771 892 797 or at Robin.harvie@harpercollins.co.uk

    A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

    Hamish Hamilton, £17.99

    Most of his life, Jasper Dean couldn't decide whether to pity, hate, love or murder his certifiably paranoid father, Martin, a man who overanalyzed anything and everything and imparted his self-garnered wisdom to his only son. But now that Martin is dead, Jasper can fully reflect on the crackpot who raised him in intellectual captivity, and what he realizes is that, for all its lunacy, theirs was a grand adventure.

    As he recollects the events that led to his father's demise, Jasper recounts a boyhood of outrageous schemes and shocking discoveries - about his infamous outlaw uncle Terry, his mysteriously absent European mother, and Martin's constant losing battle to make a lasting mark on the world he so disdains. It's a story that takes them from the Australian bush to the cafes of Paris, from the Thai jungle to strip clubs, asylums, labyrinths and criminal lairs, and from the highs of first love to the lows of failed ambition.

    Steve Toltz was born on 21st June 1972 in Sydney and has lived in Montreal, Vancouver, Barcelona and Paris, working primarily as a screenwriter but also doing stints as a private investigator and an English teacher. A Fraction of the Whole is his first novel.

    For further information or interview requests please contact:

    Amelia Fairney on 020 7010 3247 or 07764 774 291 or at Amelia.fairney@uk.penguingroup.com

    Notes to Editors:

    The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape) won the Man Booker Prize 2007.

    The Man Booker 2008 longlist, which was announced on 29th July, was:

    Author                      Title                                          Publisher

    Aravind Adiga                  The White Tiger                                                Atlantic

    Gaynor Arnold                 Girl in a Blue Dress                              Tindal Street Press

    Sebastian Barry              The Secret Scripture                           Faber and Faber

    John Berger                    From A to X                                          Verso

    Michelle de Kretser        The Lost Dog                                       Chatto & Windus

    Amitav Ghosh                 Sea of Poppies                                                John Murray

    Linda Grant                     The Clothes on Their Backs                 Virago

    Mohammed Hanif           A Case of Exploding Mangoes             Jonathan Cape

    Philip Hensher                The Northern Clemency                       Fourth Estate

    Joseph O'Neill                 Netherland                                          Fourth Estate

    Salman Rushdie             The Enchantress of Florence               Jonathan Cape

    Tom Rob Smith               Child 44                                               Simon & Schuster

    Steve Toltz                      A Fraction of the Whole                       Hamish Hamilton

     

     

     

    The V&A Museum is hosting an exhibition - The Booker 40 at the V&A - which tells the visual story of the prize over the years.  The display includes every book which has won since 1969 as well as a wide selection of shortlisted titles and one of the original Booker trophies. It examines what made ‘The Booker' one of the most talked about and influential literary prizes in the English speaking world. It opened on 6th September and will run until 17th May 2009. For further information please visit http://www.vam.ac.uk/.

    The British Council is working towards the creation of an online collection of contemporary British literature and is in negotiation with publishers to include former winners of the Booker Prize and Man Booker Prize as e-books, which can be purchased. 

    The Canterbury Festival and The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival are both holding events this October. The Canterbury Festival will see Best of the Booker Prize judge John Mullan joining Man Booker 2008 judge Louise Doughty in a panel discussion about this year's shortlist on the eve of the winner announcement. The Times Cheltenham Festival is hosting two Booker 40 readings, with a selection of former Booker and Man Booker Prize winners reading brand-new writing which will be recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 4. The festival will also host its annual Cheltenham Booker Prize, this year focusing on 1948, with a panel including A C Grayling, Hardeep Singh Kohli, Sue Perkins and Erica Wagner.

     

     

     

     

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    Man supports many awards, charities and initiatives around the world, including sponsorship of the Man Booker literary prizes and the Man Group International Climate Change Award. In the year to March 2008 the Man Group plc Charitable Trust gave 12% of its $12m charitable budget to charities concerned with improving literacy. The Trust's largest contribution in the literacy category was a £1m pledge to the ‘Every Child a Reader' reading recovery programme spread over three years from 2006. Other sizeable donations were made to Dyslexia Action and Kids Company Reading Recovery Teachers, whilst smaller contributions were made to Write to Life, Bookaid International, Volunteer Reading Help, The Shannon Trust, RNIB Talking Books and St. Petrock's (Exeter). Further information can be found at www.mangroupplc.com.

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