Robert Macfarlane to chair the 2013 Man Booker Prize for Fiction

Robert Macfarlane has been named as chair of the judges for the 2013 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, the most prestigious award for fiction written in English. Having been on the judging panel in 2004, he will now lead a panel of five judges in choosing the best book of the year.

Robert Macfarlane comments:

‘I feel very proud indeed to be chairing this prize, which has done so much to shape the modern literary landscape. I look forward greatly – with, it’s true, a dash of trepidation - to the 40,000 or so pages of reading that my fellow judges and I have ahead of us.’

Robert Macfarlane is a Fellow in English at Cambridge University, specialising in contemporary literature, and is well-known both as a critic and writer. He writes regularly on literature, travel and nature for The Guardian and Granta Magazine, among other publications.

He is the author of a number of prize-winning, non-fiction books. Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003) won The Guardian First Book Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and a Somerset Maugham Award. The Wild Places followed in 2007 and was adapted for television by the BBC. His latest book The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot (2012) was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and The Waterstones Book of the Year Award. He is currently writing a book called Underland, about subterranean worlds.

The longlist for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, ‘The Booker Dozen’ – the 12 or 13 titles under serious consideration for the prize - will be announced in July 2013. The shortlist of six titles will be announced in September. The winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize will be announced at London’s Guildhall at an awards ceremony on 15 October 2013.

The winner of the 2012 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate), made history when it was announced last month, making Hilary Mantel the first woman and the first British author to win the prize twice. In the week following the 2012 winner announcement, sales of Bring Up the Bodies increased by 474%, whilst sales of Wolf Hall (the first in the trilogy which won the prize in 2009) had increased by 707%.

For further information, please visit www.themanbookerprize.com 

Source: press release

Bring up the Bodies wins the 2012 Man Booker Prize

Second triumph for Hilary Mantel

www.themanbookerprize.com

Hilary Mantel is the winner of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for her novel 'Bring up the Bodies', published by Fourth Estate.

Hilary Mantel is the first woman and the first British author to win the prize twice. At 60, she is only the third double winner alongside J.M. Coetzee and Peter Carey. She is also the first person to win the prize for two novels in a trilogy, following her success in 2009 with 'Wolf Hall'. 
Hilary was previously longlisted in 2005 for 'Beyond Black'. She was also a judge for the prize in 1990 when A.S. Byatt won with ' Possession'.

'Bring up the Bodies' is the second win for Fourth Estate, following the success of 'Wolf Hall'. The second book in Mantel’s trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell, 'Bring up the Bodies' charts the bloody downfall of Anne Boleyn. Mantel has been widely praised for her rich ‘descriptive intimacy’ (Telegraph), ‘novelistic intelligence’ (New Yorker) and ability to transport the reader to the fifteenth century. Margaret Atwood praised her in The Guardian, saying ‘literary invention does not fail her: she's as deft and verbally adroit as ever’, whilst the judges admired Mantel's ‘even greater mastery of method, her powerful realism in the separateness of past and present - and the vivid depiction of English character and landscape’.
Sir Peter Stothard, Chair of judges, made the announcement at the awards dinner which was televised live by the BBC from London’s Guildhall.  Mantel was presented with a cheque for £50,000 by Peter Clarke, Chief Executive of Man.
Sir Peter comments: ‘This double accolade is uniquely deserved. Hilary Mantel has rewritten the rules for historical fiction. In 'Bring up the Bodies', our greatest modern writer retells the origins of modern England.’
Winning the prize in 2009 brought Hilary Mantel worldwide recognition and record sales; winning the prize this year will mean a further considerable increase. In addition to her £50,000 prize, she was also given, along with the rest of the 2012 shortlist, £2,500 and a specially commissioned handbound edition of her book.
Stothard was joined on the 2012 judging panel by: Dinah Birch, academic and literary critic; Amanda Foreman, historian, writer and broadcaster; Dan Stevens, actor; and Bharat Tandon, academic, writer and reviewer.
This year’s shortlist has been widely acclaimed. With the judging panel’s emphasis on the role of the novelist in renewing the English language, the media has celebrated the ‘return of the literary novel’ with the Man Booker Prize.

The Winner
'Bring up the Bodies'
By Hilary Mantel         
Published by Fourth Estate
RRP £20
ISBN 978-0-00-731509-3
 
The year is 1535 and Thomas Cromwell, chief Minister to Henry VIII, must work both to please the king and keep the nation safe. Anne Boleyn, for whose sake Henry has broken with Rome and created his own church, has failed to do what she promised: bear a son to secure the Tudor line. As Henry develops a dangerous attraction to Wolf Hall’s Jane Seymour, Thomas must negotiate a ‘truth’ that will satisfy Henry and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge undamaged from the bloody theatre of Anne’s final days.

A former winner of the Man Booker Prize (2009), Hilary Mantel CBE was born in Derbyshire, England on 6 July 1952. She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She was employed as a social worker, and lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. Her books include 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street' (1988); 'Fludd' (1989) winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize; 'A Place of Greater Safety' (1992), winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year award; 'A Change of Climate' (1994); 'An Experiment in Love' (1995), winner of the 1996 Hawthornden Prize; 'Beyond Black' (2005), shortlisted for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize and for the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; and 'Wolf Hall' (2009), winner of the Man Booker Prize. In 2006 she was also awarded a CBE.

Source: Press release

Man Booker Prize 2012 Shortlist Announced

Deborah Levy, Hilary Mantel, Alison Moore, Will Self, Tan Twan Eng and Jeet Thayil are the six shortlisted authors in contention for the Man Booker Prize 2012, it is announced today, Tuesday 11th September 2012. 
The judges praised the powerful language and artistry displayed in the six books, whose common themes include old age, memory and loss.

The six books, selected from the longlist of 12, are:
Author                      Title (Publisher)

Tan Twan Eng            The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books)

Deborah Levy             Swimming Home (And Other Stories / Faber & Faber)

Hilary Mantel             Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)

Alison Moore              The Lighthouse (Salt)

Will Self                      Umbrella (Bloomsbury)

Jeet Thayil                  Narcopolis (Faber & Faber)
 At the time of the longlist announcement, Chair of judges Sir Peter Stothard commented ‘the new has come powering through’. This remains true of the shortlist, which includes two first novels, from Indian author Jeet Thayil and East Midlands-based Alison Moore, and three small publishers from Newcastle-upon-Tyne (Myrmidon Books), North Norfolk (Salt Publishing) and High Wycombe (And Other Stories).
In an interesting development, Deborah Levy’s novel, Swimming Home, is now co-published by And Other Stories and Faber & Faber, following a collaboration on a mass-market edition after Levy was longlisted.
Of the six authors, two have previously been linked to the prize. Hilary Mantel won the prize in 2009 with Wolf Hall, the first of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, and was longlisted in 2005 for Beyond Black. Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng was longlisted for the prize in 2007 with his debut novel, The Gift of Rain. Four novelists, including Will Self, a radical of contemporary literature, appear on the list for the first time.
The shortlist was announced by Sir Peter Stothard, Chair of judges and Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, at a press conference held at the Man Group’s London headquarters.

Sir Peter comments:  ‘After re-reading an extraordinary longlist of twelve, it was the pure power of prose that settled most debates. We loved the shock of language shown in so many different ways and were exhilarated by the vigour and vividly defined values in the six books that we chose - and in the visible confidence of the novel's place in forming our words and ideas.’
 Stothard was joined at the press conference by the four other members of the 2012 Man Booker Prize judging panel: Dinah Birch, academic and literary critic; Amanda Foreman, historian, writer and broadcaster; Dan Stevens, actor; and Bharat Tandon, academic, writer and reviewer.
This year’s winner will be announced on Tuesday 16th October 2012, at a dinner at London’s Guildhall, where the announcement of the winner will be televised by the BBC. Each shortlisted author will receive £2,500 and a specially commissioned handbound edition of their book. The winner will receive a further £50,000. The winner may also expect a significant increase in sales of their book: Julian Barnes’ The Sense of An Ending (Jonathan Cape, Random House), which won the 2011 prize, has now sold over 300,000 in the UK in print copies alone.
 Ahead of the announcement, there will be a number of public events with the shortlisted authors including, for the first time this year, Man Booker Live: a collaboration between the Man Booker Prize and Picturehouse Entertainment to broadcast ‘Prize Readings’, an evening with the 2012 shortlisted authors at the Royal Festival Hall at London’s Southbank Centre on Monday 15th October. Cinemas across the UK will screen the event, chaired by former judge and BBC Radio 4 presenter James Naughtie, the night before the winner ceremony. Other events include a panel discussion at The Times Cheltenham Literary Festival on Saturday 1th3 October and an audience with the winner at the Apple store, Covent Garden, on Thursday 18th October.
More details of these events and further information about the prize can be found on the Man Booker Prize website www.themanbookerprize.com.

For the latest Man Booker Prize news, follow @ManBookerPrize on Twitter.

Source: Press Release

Behind the scenes at the Man Booker Prizes: new website launched

Intimate insights into the lives of Man Booker Prize writers and judges, an interactive timeline from 1969 to the present and the latest news from the literary world: just some of the treasures that can be found on the new-look website for the Man Booker Prizes, launched on Friday 20th July 2012.

Reflecting the evolution of the Man Booker awards in the digital era, the enhanced site will continue to focus on the very best in fiction whilst allowing visitors to experience the prizes in greater depth and across a variety of new platforms and formats. It’s never been easier to keep up with prize news online, be it on pocket-sized smartphones, tablets or widescreen monitors. Live feeds from Twitter and Facebook also mean up-to-the-minute updates on what people are saying about the prizes and the wider world of literature.

Regular features will include video interviews with highly acclaimed writers, kicking off with Howard Jacobson talking about his experience of winning the 2010 prize and writing his new novel, Zoo Time, as well as Kazuo Ishiguro and Sarah Waters, talking about the impact of the Man Booker Prize on their careers and giving a behind-the-scenes glimpse of their writing habits and favourite authors. For the next month, visitors will also have the chance to watch an exclusive interview with 2011 Man Booker Prize winner, Julian Barnes, as he speaks candidly about his experience of being shortlisted and, finally, winning the prize.

As well as hearing about prize-winning authors, two key names behind the prizes – Ion Trewin, Literary Director of the Booker Prize Foundation, and Fiammetta Rocco, Administrator of the Man Booker International – will give an insight into what it is to oversee a leading literary prize. There will also be podcasts from the prize season, such as Dame Stella Rimington’s winner announcement at last year’s award ceremony, as well as interviews with 2011 shortlisted authors.

Additionally, in the coming months there will be picture galleries from Man Booker Prize events and an events calendar to help book lovers keep up with writers and judges throughout the year, from local bookshop signings to major literary festivals.

Visitors to the new site can also explore the history of the prizes through an online archive; over 40 years of fascinating facts from 1969 to the present day. This timeline allows visitors to filter information by years, prizes, books, judges and writers.

The Man Booker Prize celebrates its 44^th year in 2012, whilst the Man Booker International Prize will award its fifth winner in 2013. In the last year alone, the Man Booker Prizes website has attracted in excess of a million visitors from across the globe, whilst its Twitter feed has accrued almost 15,000 followers. The new website is the latest in a series of digital initiatives for the prize, which include a Man Booker Prize room on Apple's iBookstore and Kindles for Man Booker Prize judges.

The 2012 Man Booker Prize judges will announce ‘The Booker Dozen’, their longlist of 12 or 13 titles, on 25th July 2012, followed by a shortlist of six titles on 11th September.  The winner of the 2012 Man Booker Prize will be announced at London’s Guildhall at an awards ceremony on 16 th October 2012.

For further details please visit www.themanbookerprize.com

twitter.com/ManBookerPrize