| Banville named for top authors award
 IRISH
novelist John Banville was named among the 15 writers on the contenders’
list for the Man Booker International Prize for 2007 announced in Toronto.
Worth £60,000 to the winner, this award is different from its sister
prize the original Man Booker Prize For Fiction in that it highlights
a writer’s creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction
on the world stage — instead of being for just one book alone.
The other contenders are Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey,
Don DeLillo, Carlos Fuentes, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Harry Mulisch,
Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Amos Oz, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie and
Michael Tournier. The winner will be announced in June.
Irish novelist Colm Tóibín is one of this year’s three
judges along with South African writer Nadine Gordimer and academic, author
and critic Elaine Showalter.
They have picked for their shortlist writers from 10 countries. Four are
writers in translation.
Awarded every two years the prize goes to a living author who has published
fiction either originally in English or whose work is available in English
translation.
It is the first time an Irish writer is on the judges’ list for
this international prize. John Banville, a former literary editor of The
Irish Times, won the Man Booker Prize For Fiction in 2005 with his novel
The Sea.
Meanwhile, at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin Banville’s recent
crime novel Christine Falls written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black
was named as one of the novels shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction
Award.
The other shortlisted novelists are: Roddy Doyle for Paula Spencer; Pat
McCabe for Winterwood; Claire Kilroy for Tenderwire and Gerard Donovan
for Julius Winsome. The winner of this award will be announced at the
opening of Writers’ Week in Listowel on May 30. |
