Sunday, February 20, 2005
The Booker, Man
The Man Booker International Prize nominees can be used as a reference guide for buying a good library:

Margaret Atwood (Canada)
Saul Bellow (Canada)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia)
Gunter Grass (Germany)
Ismail Kadare (Albania)
Milan Kundera (Czech Republic)
Stanislaw Lem (Poland)
Doris Lessing (UK)
Ian McEwan (UK)
Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt)
Tomas Eloy Martinez (Argentina)
Kenzaburo Oe (Japan)
Cynthia Ozick (US)
Philip Roth (US)
Muriel Spark (UK)
Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)
John Updike (US)
Abraham B Yehoshua (Israel)

The 'regular' Man Booker Prize for Fiction is an annual individual prize celebrating "English language fiction as a major cultural force" and open only to British Commonwealth or Republic of Ireland citizens. Beginning this year, an additional Booker prize will be awarded every two years with an almost $100,000 purse; it can be won by any living author of any nationality as long as his or her writing is available in English. (An author can only win once.) Organizers say the new prize "will echo and reinforce the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that literary excellence will be its sole focus [and] goes a step further in highlighting one writer's continued creativity, development and overall contribution to world fiction."

I must say that this first list reads so much like a bookshelf in an 'important' literary collector's household that it seems a tad pretentious. Does the Man Booker see itself as the Nobel Prize of Literature? Does it possibly take itself awfully seriously? Did Hamlet love his mother too much? (Does anyone besides me remember Cliff's Cliff Notes?)

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