Tag: Man Booker Prize

Writer’s Desk: Stop Waiting

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

africanwarriors1

We have all books we love that could have been just a little bit better. Plenty of time and energy has been wasted on arguing over how to improve an existing work of art. Marlon James, the Macalester College professor and Man Booker-winning author of A History of Seven Killings, has been there. He told a magazine that:

I realized how sick and tired I was of arguing about whether there should be a black hobbit in Lord of the Rings.

historyofsevenkillings1So what is James going to do about it? He’s writing his own multi-part fantasy series set in Africa. He calls it “an African Game of Thrones“:

African folklore is just as rich, and just as perverse as that shit. We have witches, we have demons, we have goblins, and mad kings. We have stories of royal succession that would put Wolf Hall to shame. We beat the Tudors two times over…

The first book will be called Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Watch for it.

And in the meantime, take James’s advice: If you see something that needs to be written, why not write it?

Readers’ Corner: The 2013 Man Booker Prize

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

harvest-194x300In case you were curious about where to place your money when betting on which book is going to win this year’s Man Booker Prize, the gambling quants over at Ladbrokes have done the math and proclaimed that Jim Crace is going to win this time, for his novel, Harvest. Here’s the odds rundown for the six shortlisted novels:

  • Jim Crace, Harvest — 11/8
  • Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries — 11/4
  • Colm Toibin, The Testament of Mary — 4/1
  • Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being — 8/1
  • Noviolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names — 9/1
  • Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowlands — 9/1

The announcement comes tomorrow.

UPDATE: Looks like the Ladbrokes lads were a tad off: the prize was won by Eleanor Catton’s 832-page epic The Luminaries. Which apparently she started writing when she was 25.

Dept. of Literary Oddsmaking: The Man Booker Shortlist

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

The panel of judges in charge of determining what was truly awesome in literature this year and then awarding it the 2012 Man Booker Prize have announced the six novels that are making the shortlist. They are:

  • The Garden of Evening Mists, by Tan Twan Eng
  • Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy
  • Bring up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel
  • The Lighthouse, by Alison Moore
  • Umbrella, by Will Self
  • Narcopolis, by Jeet Thayil

Last year’s winner was Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, a particularly well-sculpted piece of fiction that was nevertheless several times too anemic in presentation for its own good.

The current bookies’ favorite—since people will, it seems, bet on absolutely anything—to take home the prize is Hilary Mantel’s bloody exciting and really close to perfect Bring Up the Bodies. That might not be entirely fair, since Mantel already took home the prize in 2009 for Wolf Hall, the precursor to Bodies. But nobody ever said literature was anything but a blood sport; albeit one waged in genteel, passive-aggressive fashion.