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.
Article comments
1 - Aaman
What a fine list of novelists - one notes the absence of Salman Rushdie.
Finalists I think, will be:
Saul Bellow
Gunther Grass
Doris Lessing
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
John Updike,
For the winner, I propose Senor Marquez
Beautiful book covers, Eric
2 - Rodney Welch
So the Booker people pony up cash for one more useless literary award, a lifetime achievement honor to one of a host of usual suspects. Who cares?
3 - Aaman
Actually the money will come from the Man group, one of the largest hedge-fund outfits around. These awards are no more 'booker' than a hooker.
I guess this will become a second-chance Nobel Prize
4 - Eric Olsen
I would say the legitimacy of something like this is taht for most people on earth, the "usual suspects" are hardly household names, even if some are in many quarters, and anything that draws attention to fine literature for the general public can only be a good and worthwhile thing. Just putting this together, I kept saying "Damn, I should read more of these people."
5 - Rodney Welch
"Most people on earth" don't care and prizes like this aren't going to make them care -- which is fine; there's no reason they should. All awards are just p.r., more than anything; this one is superfluous besides.
6 - Eric Olsen
but some are influenced and educated by them and that is their value. PR isn't a bad thing, per se.
7 - Rodney Welch
Well fine -- let's have a "Best Male Writer Past the Age of 60" Award. A "Best Living Female Author Award." A "Best Young Female Writer With the Nicest Can" award. A "Best Novel Sold to Hollywood" award. A "Best Novel That Will Never Be Sold to Hollywood" award. A "Best Non-Fiction Asian Writer Living in America" award. A"Best Writer Who Has Never Been in My Kitchen" award. Then we can all just sit back as people throw out their video games and disconnect their TiVO's and pour into a headlong mad rush to the local B&N, tumbling ass over elbows to get to a classic re-issue of "Henderson the Rain King." Then they'll all go home, read to page 4, put it on their shelf, talk about how great it is at cocktail parties, and we can all be thankful for the enormous boost in literacy. Yeah right.
8 - Eric Olsen
that was a bit cynical, don't you think Rodney? I vote for the "Best Young Female Writer With the Nicest Can" award.
9 - Maggie Cohen
I vote for A.B.Yehoshua,for the impact of his work.