Man Booker Dozen in the News
Media’s response to longlist announcement
10 August 2007
On Tuesday afternoon the Man Booker Prize press office telephones were ringing off the hook as journalists’ deadlines loomed and the judges still showed no signs of coming to a decision. The Man Booker judges wearily emerged from their meeting room late afternoon but deadlines were met and the next day’s papers were awash with news of this year’s longlist.
The Times described this year’s contest as the year that ‘David took on Goliath when novice authors found themselves up against two literary heavyweights.’ The Evening Standard (London) and The Daily Telegraph focused on the big names who had been published this year but didn’t make the Man Booker Dozen. The Evening Standard said,‘McEwan is the biggest name on a 13-strong longlist that failed to include the likes of Sebastian Faulks, Graham Swift, Blake Morrison and Lionel Shriver.’
Many papers picked up on the controversy surrounding McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and whether the 166-page love story was eligible for the prize as it had been described as a novella. The Financial Times wrote, ‘Novellas are ineligible for entry into the contest. However, his publisher Jonathan Cape, has said more recently that the book is a ‘short novel’.’
The Independent highlighted that in the event of On Chesil Beach going on to win this year’s prize ‘McEwan will join the Nobel laureate J.M.Coetzee and Peter Carey as one of only three authors to have won the prize twice.’
The Daily Telegraph admitted that a number of novels had, as yet, gone unnoticed by their literary editor and endeavoured to put this right. They went on to say ‘it reflects well on the care with which the judges have sought out promise.’
Speaking to The Evening Standard, Janine Cook, fiction buyer for Waterstone’s, described the list as the Man Booker at its best - ’a longlist that champions new and emerging writers without fear of the old guard.’
The Guardian described the Man Booker Prize list ‘as one of the most remarkable surprises of its 39-year history.’ Speaking to The Guardian, Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller, said ‘(the judges) are trying to usher in a new generation of writers. (All) authors are genuinely in the running for the biggest literary prize in the world .’
BBC News picked up on the international reach of the longlist saying ‘highly-charged stories from around the world have a strong presence’ in the longlist. The Times of India described the longlist as ‘the most Asian ever’ flagging up ‘Kota-born, Cardiff-raised, London resident Nikita Lalwani’s ‘Gifted’, Anglo-Indian Indra Sinha’s ‘Animal’s People’, Pakistani Mohsin Hamid’s ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ and Malaysian Tan Twan Eng’s ‘The Gift of Rain’.
Other international press covering the longlist included Canada.com, leading with Toronto-born Michael Redhill, and RTE Ireland, flagging up Dublin-born Anne Enright.
The judges meet on 6 September 2007 to whittle the Man Booker Dozen down to just the six-title shortlist.
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