Rushdie, Roth top Booker list
2007-04-13 14:48
Montreal - Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth top a list of 15 top novelists from 10 countries contending for the second Man Booker International prize, prize organisers announced in Montreal.
In a shortlist for the prize, announced on Thursday, the younger sister to the four decade-old Man Booker Prize for Fiction from the British Commonwealth, Nigerian novelist-poet Chinua Achebe, author of global best-seller Things Fall Apart, and Israel's Amos Oz led a list of the world's most prominent living authors in English or translated into English.
Several, like Australian Peter Carey, Irishman John Banville, Margaret Atwood, Briton Ian McEwan and Rushdie are already laureates for the original Man Booker award.
Others on the list include American Don DeLillo, France's Michel Tournier, Canadian Alice Munro, Canadian/Sri Lankan Michael Ondaatje, Harry Mulisch of the Netherlands, Panama-born Carlos Fuentes, and Persian-born Briton Doris Lessing.
"With this list, we offer a gift to readers all over the world, an opportunity to join a conversation on 15 writers, diverse in nationality, language, themes and techniques, but united in their dedication to the power of the word," the judges said in a statement.
The final prize will be announced in June, judged by academic Elaine Showalter, writer Nadine Gordimer, and writer and academic, Colm Toibin.
The winner of the prize, awarded every two years, receives £60 000 (R859 491).
The first winner in 2005 was Albanian Ismail Kadare.