Composite of six shortlisted jackets

Shortlist for the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction

J M Coetzee in running for the first hat-trick

A S Byatt, J M Coetzee, Adam Foulds, Hilary Mantel, Simon Mawer and Sarah Waters are today, Tuesday 8 September, announced as the shortlisted authors for the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.  For four decades the prize - the leading literary award in the English speaking world - has brought recognition, reward and readership to the outstanding new novels of the year.  The shortlist was announced by Chair of judges James Naughtie at a press conference held at the Man Group plc's London headquarters.

The six books, selected from the Man Booker Prize longlist of 13, are:

Author                          Title                                          Publisher

A S Byatt                     The Children's Book                 Random House, Chatto and Windus

J M Coetzee               Summertime                            Random House, Harvill Secker

Adam Foulds               The Quickening Maze              Random House, Jonathan Cape

Hilary Mantel               Wolf Hall                                  HarperCollins, Fourth Estate

Simon Mawer              The Glass Room                       Little, Brown

Sarah Waters               The Little Stranger                    Little, Brown, Virago

Chair James Naughtie, comments:

"We're thrilled to be able to announce such a strong shortlist, so enticing that it will certainly give us a headache when we come to select the winner. The choice will be a difficult one. There is thundering narrative, great inventiveness, poetry and sharp human insight in abundance.

"These are six writers on the top of their form. They've given us great enjoyment already, and it's a measure of our confidence in their books that all of us are looking forward to reading them yet again before we decide on the prizewinner. What more could we ask?"

Having previously won in 1999 with Disgrace and 1983 with Life & Times of Michael K, South African writer J.M. Coetzee would be the first author to win the Man Booker Prize three times if successful this year.  A.S. Byatt is in the running for a second win - her novel Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990.  Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black was longlisted in 2005 and both Mantel and Byatt have been judges of the prize.  Sarah Waters has been shortlisted twice for Fingersmith (2002) and The Night Watch (2006).  The youngest on the list, at 34, is Adam Foulds and Simon Mawer is shortlisted for his eighth novel, The Glass Room. 

The winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction will be revealed on Tuesday 6 October at a dinner at London's Guildhall and will be broadcast on BBC News across television, radio and online.  The winning author will receive £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.

Chaired by broadcaster and author James Naughtie, the 2009 judges are Lucasta Miller, biographer and critic; Michael Prodger, Literary Editor of The Sunday Telegraph; Professor John Mullan, academic and author and Sue Perkins, comedian and broadcaster.

For the first time, the Man Booker Prize has partnered with private members club, The Groucho Club.  Based in Soho, London, The Groucho Club will host an exclusive event with some of the shortlisted authors on Monday 28 September.  The Groucho Club will also offer each of the six shortlisted authors a year's membership to the club.

On the eve of the winner announcement, Monday 5 October, the shortlisted authors will appear at Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall.  It is the only public opportunity to join the 2009 shortlisted authors for readings from their books, debate and an audience Q&A. 

For the second consecutive year the Man Booker Prize has teamed up with GoSpoken to provide free audio extracts from all 13 longlisted titles downloadable to your mobile phone.  Visit www.themanbookerprize.com/audio to listen online or text MBP to 60300* to download to your mobile phone. 

For further information about the prize please visit http://www.themanbookerprize.com/ or follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/ManBookerPrize

For all press enquiries please contact

Jill Cotton or Lucy Chavasse at Colman Getty

Tel: 020 7631 2666

E-mail: jill@colmangetty.co.uk or lucy@colmangetty.co.uk

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Shortlisted author's biography, book synopsis and publicist contact details

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt

Random House, Chatto & Windus, £18.99

Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed with her children gathered at her knee. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf.  In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a storybook world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins, and their friends are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries their own secrets. The world seems full of promise but the calm is already rocked by political differences, by Fabian arguments about class and free love, by the idealism of anarchists from Russia and Germany. The sons rebel against their parents' plans; the girls dream of independent futures, becoming doctors or fighting for the vote.

A S Byatt is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short story-writer and critic.  She was born on 24 August 1936.  A S Byatt won the Booker Prize in 1990 for Possession. Her other books include the quartet of The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whispering Woman.  Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she taught at the Central School of Art and Design, and was Senior Lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.

For more information please contact Sue Amaradivakara, Chatto & Windus on 020 7840 8435 or email samaradivakara@randomhouse.co.uk

Summertime by J M Coetzee

Random House, Harvill Secker, £17.99

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee.  He plans to focus on the years when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'. Never having met Coetzee, he interviews those who were important to him, among them a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot and a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him.  From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others.  Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened.  His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry, evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time. Summertime completes the trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with "Boyhood" and "Youth".

J M Coetzee was born in South Africa on 9 February 1940.  His work includes Waiting For the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

For further information, please contact Kate Bland or Rebecca Linsley on 020 7840 8688 or email linsleybland@randomhouse.co.uk

The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

Random House, Jonathan Cape, £12.99

Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, The Quickening Maze centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum - an institution run on reformist principles which would later become known as occupational therapy. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum's owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr Matthew Allen.  For John Clare, a man who had grown up steeped in the freedoms and exhilarations of nature,  incarceration triggers a vertiginous fall, through hallucinatory episodes of insanity and dissolving identity, towards his final madness.

Adam Foulds was born on 8 October 1974 and lives in south London. He is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia and his poetry has appeared in a number of literary magazines. His first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times, was published in 2007.

For further information please contact Christian Lewis on 020 7840 8539 or email clewis@randomhouse.co.uk

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel                              

HarperCollins - Fourth Estate, £18.99

Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey, his chief advisor, is charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant.  Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages.

Hilary Mantel CBE was born in Glossop, Derbyshire on 6 July 1952. After studying Law, she was employed as a social worker, then lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, returning to Britain in the mid-1980s.  Her novels include Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), A Change of Climate (1994), The Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (2003) and Learning to Talk: Short Stories (2003).  Her novel Beyond Black (2005) was shortlisted for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize and the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.  In 2006 she was also awarded a CBE.

For further information please contact
Patrick Hargadon on 020 8307 4067 or email patrick.hargadon@harpercollins.co.uk

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer                   

Little, Brown, £17.99

High on a Czechoslovak hill, the Landauer House shines as a wonder of steel and glass and onyx built specially for newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a Jew married to a gentile. But the radiant honesty of 1930 that the house, with its unique Glass Room, seems to engender quickly tarnishes as the storm clouds of WW2 gather, and eventually the family must flee, accompanied by Viktor's lover and her child.

As the ownership house slips from Czech to Nazi to Soviet and finally back to the Czechoslovak state, the crystalline perfection of the Glass Room draws the Landauers back to where their story began.

Simon Mawer was born on 18 September 1948 in England, and spent his childhood there, in Cyprus and in Malta. He now lives with his wife and two children in Italy and teaches at the English School in Rome. He is the author of seven other novel's including Swimming to Ithaca, Mendel's Dwarf, The Gospel of Judas and The Fall for which he won The Boardman Tasker Award.

For more information please contact
Susan de Soissans on 020 7911 8069 or email susan.desoissons@littlebrown.co.uk

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Little Brown, Virago, £16.99

When Dr Faraday is urgently called to Hundreds Hall, he is both curious and nostalgic.  More than thirty years before, he had visited the house with his mother, who had once worked there as a maid.  As a boy, he had been deeply impressed by the grandness of the house and of the Ayres family, but as he approaches the Hall one day in 1947, Dr Faraday realises that much has changed and the once grand house is now in decline. So begins Dr Faraday's friendship with the remaining Ayres family (the dowager Mrs Ayres, the spinster daughter, Caroline and the son and heir to the estate, Roderick) a relationship complicated by his lingering class resentments, by his growing attraction to Caroline and by the odd and dramatic events that occur in the house as the hot summer gives way to a dark and gloomy winter.

Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 21 July 1966.  She won the Betty Trask Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, was shortlisted twice for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2000.  She has been shortlisted twice for the Man Booker Prize, in 2002 for Fingersmith and 2006 for The Night Watch and won the CWA Ellis Peters Dagger Award for Historical Crime Fiction and The South Bank Show Award for Literature.

For more information please contact
Susan de Soissans on 020 7911 8069 or email susan.desoissons@littlebrown.co.uk

Notes to Editors:

 

Author                          Title                                          Publisher

Byatt, A S                    The Children's Book                 Random House, Chatto and Windus

Coetzee, J M              Summertime                            Random House, Harvill Secker

Foulds, Adam              The Quickening Maze              Random House, Jonathan Cape

Hall, Sarah                   How to Paint a Dead Man      Faber and Faber

Harvey, Samantha      The Wilderness                         Random House, Jonathan Cape

Lever, James                Me Cheeta                              HarperCollins, Fourth Estate

Mantel, Hilary              Wolf Hall                                  HarperCollins, Fourth Estate

Mawer, Simon             The Glass Room                       Little, Brown

O'Loughlin, Ed             Not Untrue & Not Unkind        Penguin Ireland

Scudamore, James      Heliopolis                                 Random House, Harvill Secker

Toibin, Colm                Brooklyn                                  Penguin, Viking

Trevor, William             Love and Summer                   Penguin, Viking

Waters, Sarah              The Little Stranger                    Little, Brown, Virago

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Man Group supports many awards, charities and initiatives around the world, including sponsorship of the Man Booker literary prizes. In the year to March 2OO9 the Man Group plc Charitable Trust gave almost 1O% of its charitable budget to charities concerned with improving literacy. The Trust continues to support the ‘Every Child a Reader' reading recovery programme with a donation of £1m spread over three years from 2OO6. A sizeable donation was also made to Dyslexia Action, with the Medical Foundation for the care of victims of torture ‘Write to Life' project, Bookaid International, Volunteer Reading Help, The Shannon Trust and St. Petrock's (Exeter) receiving smaller donations. The Trust also supports the RNIB Talking Books Service, enabling the production and distribution of Talking Book formats of the shortlisted titles of the Man Booker Prize.

Further information can be found at http://www.mangroupplc.com/

 

 

 

The Man Booker Prize Fiction at its finest