Longlists
The Man Booker 2008 longlist has been announced.
It includes Arvind Adiga (The White Tiger), Amitav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies), Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) and Salman Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence). Here’s a selection from the chatter:
What one of the judges had to say in a Guardian blog.
Laura Barton on thrillers and the list.
Canongate publisher James Byng doesn’t thinkthe thriller should be there. “I cannot respect a judging committee that decides to pick a book like Child 44, a fairly well-written and well-paced thriller that is no more than that, over novels as exceptional as Helen Garner’s The Spare Room or Ross Raisin’s God’s Own Country,” he wrote on the online forum.
Boyd Tonkin: There are five debut novelists on the list.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Maybe the longlist is all the Booker we should have.
As for Rushdie, according to A.N.Wilson, he and other “humbler scribblers, in common with most people in England, hold him in abhorrence.” Er, including his police minders, one of whom has also written a book… recounting, among other things, how they once locked him in a cupboard and went to a pub. But maybe Rushdie will tell his side of the story too.
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Also here’s the Man Asian Literary Prize longlist, which includes eleven Indian authors in a list of twenty-one. Indians on the list are:
Tulsi Badrinath (”Melting Love”),
Anjum Hasan (”Neti, Neti”),
Daisy Hasan (”The To-Let House”),
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi (”Lost Flamingoes of Bombay”),
Amit Varma (”My Friend, Sancho”),
Sarayu Srivatsa (”The Last Pretence”),
Kavery Nambisan (”The Story that Must Not be Told”),
Sumana Roy (”Love in the Chicken’s Neck”),
Vaibhav Saini (”On the Edge of Pandemonium”),
Rupa Krishnan (”Something Wicked This Way Comes”)
Salma (”Midnight Tales”).
Here’s more about the Indian writers on the list.
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And for those who aren’t on either of the longlists, no need to lose heart: here’s Pothi.com, a new self-publishing website where writers can themselves upload and sell their books online. Techtree has more information here.
