Man Booker Prize expert comment: weak list that reflects last year's decision to open up the prize to Anglophone novelists from around the globe
Release Date 09 September 2014
David Brauner, Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Reading, gives his expert opinion on the Man Booker Prize shortlist announced today.
Professor Brauner said:
"This is a weak list more notable for the novels it has omitted than for those that have made the cut. After all the furore last year about Man Booker opening up the prize to Anglophone novelists from around the globe, this year's list looks as though it has been compiled specifically to disprove the theory that this would lead to the domination of the prize by US authors.
"The biggest names on the list, Howard Jacobson, who won the Prize in 2010 for The Finkler Question and Ali Smith, who has made the shortlist twice previously - are both British. I suspect that one of them will win.
"This is good news for those such as Philip Hensher and A.S. Byatt who were gloomily predicting that English and Commonwealth novelists wouldn't get a look-in once the literary heavyweights of America were eligible. Jacobson's is the strongest book on the list but the panel may well be reluctant to make him a two-time winner so soon after Hilary Mantel.
"Martin Amis received his now-customary snub at the long-list stage. The strongest novel on that list, Orfeo by the brilliant American novelist Richard Powers, has not made it. Indeed many of the other best books published in the last twelve months, such as Susan Minot's Thirty Girls, Donna Tart's The Goldfinch and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah were also excluded.
"These books, along with the latest short-story collections by Lorrie Moore and Lydia Davis, will be read and re-read long after most of the books on the shortlist have been forgotten."
Prof Brauner's shortlist
Orfeo
Thirty Girls
The Goldfinch
Americanah
The Zone of Interest (Martin Amis)
Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? (Dave Eggers)