In the wake of the furore surrounding the 2011 Man Booker Prize, we were curious to see how the panel would respond: would it play safe and select well-known names? Or bravely explore new authors?
It appears the panel has opted for bravery, with four new names gracing the 2012 shortlist. According to the post on Guardian.co.uk:
Of the four debuts to make the longlist, two were chosen for the shortlist: Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse, about a man trying to find himself on a walking holiday, and Indian poet Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis, set amongst the opium dens of 1970s Mumbai. Moore and Thayil will be competing for the £50,000 Man Booker prize with Mantel, who won the Booker with Wolf Hall in 2009 and has continued to follow the life of Henry VIII’s adviser Thomas Cromwell in Bring Up the Bodies, and Self’s critically acclaimed Umbrella, the story of a victim of the sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the first world war.
Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, in which a young woman entangles herself in the life of an English poet and his family on holiday in the south of France, and Malaysian writer Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists, set in post-second world war Malaya, complete the shortlist, which was announced in London this morning.
Some exciting titles which will likely find their way into the LBG library soon.