The winning writer of the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction will be handed the £50,000 prize during a ceremony at London's Guildhall on 6 October. This year's shortlist has been considered a vintage year, the six nominees including JM Coetzee and AS Byatt, both of whom are past winners of the literary award.
South African Coetzee is hoping to become the first three-time winner with his fictional memoir, Summertime. Byatt is nominated for The Children's Book, a saga that follows a series of Arts and Crafts families at the turn of the 20th century. Adam Foulds' The Quickening Maze is based set in and around an asylum in 1840, whilst Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is an account of the life and times of Thomas Cromwell, Chief Adviser to Henry VII. With the exception of Sarah Walters’ The Little Stranger, the novels are based on real figures – or, in the case of Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room, on a modernist house, Der Glasraum. [more detail].
Interviews with each of the authors and audio extracts of each of their titles can be found on the Man Booker website as well as a teaser section of each of the titles to download to mobile phones in both audio and text versions.
Winner: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.
