Irish Author Beats Favourites to Land Britain's Booker Prize
LONDON (AFP) - Irish author John Banville beat higher profile favourites Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith to become the surprise winner of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for fiction.
The 59-year-old was handed the 50,000-pound (72,000-euro, 87,000-dollar) award -- and the massive rise in sales which inevitably follows -- for "The Sea", described by the judges as "a masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected".
Bookmakers had made Banville a 7-1 outsider for what is Britain's best-known literary prize, also one of the most prestigious annual awards in the world for a single work of fiction.
This year's favourite had been British author Julian Barnes for his novel "Arthur and George", followed by 1989 Booker winner Kazuo Ishiguro and 29-year-old British prodigy Zadie Smith.
Instead, the judges said they had been torn between Banville's work and "Never Let Me Go", the latest novel by Japanese-born British writer Ishiguro, with chairman of the judging panel John Sutherland having to cast the deciding vote.
"In an extraordinarily closely-contested last round, in which the judges felt the level of the shortlisted novels was as high as it can ever have been, they have agreed to award the Man Booker Prize to John Banville's 'The Sea'," Sutherland said.
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The 59-year-old was handed the 50,000-pound (72,000-euro, 87,000-dollar) award -- and the massive rise in sales which inevitably follows -- for "The Sea", described by the judges as "a masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected".
Bookmakers had made Banville a 7-1 outsider for what is Britain's best-known literary prize, also one of the most prestigious annual awards in the world for a single work of fiction.
This year's favourite had been British author Julian Barnes for his novel "Arthur and George", followed by 1989 Booker winner Kazuo Ishiguro and 29-year-old British prodigy Zadie Smith.
Instead, the judges said they had been torn between Banville's work and "Never Let Me Go", the latest novel by Japanese-born British writer Ishiguro, with chairman of the judging panel John Sutherland having to cast the deciding vote.
"In an extraordinarily closely-contested last round, in which the judges felt the level of the shortlisted novels was as high as it can ever have been, they have agreed to award the Man Booker Prize to John Banville's 'The Sea'," Sutherland said.
Read the rest of the article here.