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Man Booker finalists announced
07/09/2007 13:03 - (SA)
London - Long-standing favourite Ian McEwan faced a strong challenge from little-known New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones on Thursday, as judges announced the finalists for the Man Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious award for fiction.
McEwan's tale of repression-thwarted love, On Chesil Beach, is the best-seller on the six-novel shortlist, and was the bookies' favourite when the 13-book long list was announced last month.
But bookmakers said they had taken a flurry of bets on Jones' Mister Pip, in which Pacific islanders are introduced to Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.
Bookies William Hill made Jones the 2-1 favourite for the Booker on Thursday, just ahead of McEwan on 5-2.
"From our point of view it's a two-horse race," said spokesperson Graham Sharpe.
McEwan has won the Booker once before, for Amsterdam in 1998. But some have questioned whether the slim On Chesil Beach is long enough to be a novel.
The other finalists are:
English writer Nicola Barker's Darkmans, hailed by the panel as "an ambitious and energetic contemporary ghost story";
The Gathering, a family epic set in England and Ireland by Irish author Anne Enright;
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Pakistan's Moshin Hamid, a critically praised novel about a Westernised middle-class Pakistani whose life is transformed by the September 11 attacks;
Animal's People, a novel about the Bhopal chemical disaster by India's Indra Sinha.
Howard Davies, chairman of the judging panel, said choosing the finalists had taken "passionate and careful consideration."
The winner of the £50 000 award will be announced at a ceremony in London on October 16.
The prize, which is open to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth of former British colonies, was founded in 1969 and long known as the Booker Prize. It was renamed when the financial services conglomerate Man Group PLC began sponsoring it five years ago.
William Hill set odds of 4-1 on Barker, 5-1 on Hamid and 8-1 on Enright and Indra.
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South Africa
