The Man Booker International Prize will be awarded once every two years for career achievement to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English, or is generally available in translation in the English language. 2005 sees the awarding of the inaugural prize. The prize, sponsored by the Man Group, will be £60,000 and an author can only win the award once.

The Man Booker International Prize will echo and reinforce the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that literary excellence will be its sole focus. This new prize goes a step further in highlighting one writer's continued creativity, development and overall contribution to world fiction. The winner will be announced in early June.

The Judges' List of Contenders was announced yesterday from Georgetown University, Washington (webcast of the announcement here):

MARGARET ATWOOD Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College. She currently lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson.Throughout her thirty years of writing, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and several honorary degrees. She is the author of more than twenty-five volumes of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, one of which, The Blind Assassin won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000.

Atwood's work has been published in more than thirty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian.

Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto


SAUL BELLOW
Saul Bellow was born in Canada in 1915 and grew up in Chicago. He attended Chicago, Northwestern and Wisconsin universities and has a B.Sc. in anthropology. He has been a visiting lecturer at the universities of Princeton and New York and associate professor at the University of Minnesota. He has also lived in Paris and travelled extensively in Europe.

In 1948 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and he has received a grant from the Ford Foundation. He is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and was elected the third Neil Gunn Fellow by the Scottish Arts Council in 1976. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, the first American to win the prize since John Steinbeck in 1962. In 1977 Saul Bellow won the Gold Medal for the Novel, which is awarded every sixth year by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1978 he won the (USA) National Arts Club Gold Medal of Honor. In 1984 President Mitterrand made him a Commander of the Legion of Honour.

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