Aravind Adiga
The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize, considered to be the most prestigious award for literary fiction in English, is out. Early favourite, Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence gets passed over while two other Indian writers — Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies) and the 33-year-old Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger) make it to the final six.
BBC lists the six who made it.
In The Telegraph (UK), James Delingpole is unimpressed with the list of ‘token Asians’, ‘Irish misery novelist’ and ‘gay’ writer — usual suspects. But writers rarely slag off other novelist or, for that matter, literary awards.
Token Asian; Oirish misery novelist; another token Asian; Guardian woman; gay; token Australian wild-card with beard who looks definitely a bit foreign. Hmm. I wonder which of the usual suspects on the shortlist is going to win the Booker Prize this year.
“Aaagh!” I’m going to go, when I see these appallingly sexist, racist, homophobic words under my byline in bald print in a respectable, widely read national newspaper. “Did I really write that sentence? Was I drunk? Was I trying to kill my literary career stone dead?”
Amitav Ghosh
And in The Telegraph (India), Amit Roy takes a closer look at the Indian contenders
Two books by Indian authors — Sea of Poppies by Calcutta-born Amitav Ghosh and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, a debut novelist from Chennai — have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
There was bitter disappointment for Pakistani author Mohammed Hanif, whose much-fancied A Case of Exploding Mangoes was on the long-list of 13 novels announced in July and was being talked about as the probable winner.
In The Guardian, why Salman Rushdie not is “not good enough” for Booker shortlist:
Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence was simply not a good enough book to make it past the longlist stage of this year’s Booker prize, according to the chair of judges, Michael Portillo. To add insult to the double Booker of Booker winner’s injured pride, Portillo added that the judges didn’t even spend that much time discussing it.
“I can say that the discussions we had about Salman Rushdie, as with all the other books, was a discussion about the book and not about the author. It was about the merits of the book,” he told guardian.co.uk after the press conference at which the shortlist was announced.
“In the opinion of these five people taken together, Salman Rushdie’s was not one of the top six books for us. We didn’t have a huge debate about it.”
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