Man Booker Prize contenders include US novelists for first time
The US novelists Joshua Ferris and Karen Joy Fowler will have to beat the odds to become the first American winners of the Man Booker Prize to be announced on Tuesday night in London.
For the first time, the £50,000 prize is open to any author writing originally in English and published in the UK, but Ferris's and Fowler's books, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, described as a New York tale of existential dentistry, and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, a tale of family life where a psychologist father twins his daughter with a chimp, are the bookmakers' outsiders. Previously, the prize was open to authors from the UK and Commonwealth countries, the Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe but the prize organisers decided to throw it open for 2014 after 45 years.
Announcing that decision, Jonathan Taylor, chairman of the Booker Prize Foundation said: 'We are embracing the freedom of English in its versatility, in its vigour, in its vitality and in its glory wherever it may be. We are abandoning the constraints of geography and national boundaries.'
The favourite to accept the award from the Duchess of Cornwall at the Guildhall in London is Neel Mukherjee, the Calcutta-born Briton, for The Lives of Others, his story of family life set in the city of his birth. William Hill has him at odds of 5/2, followed by Howard Jacobson at 9/2, for his novel, J, a story set in the future after some unidentified but momentous catastrophe has taken place.
At 72 years old, Jacobson, a former winner with The Finkler Question in 2010, would become the oldest ever winner. Ali Smith has been shortlisted twice before, with The Accidental (2005) and Hotel World (2001), and would be the first Scottish woman to win for How To Be Both, which entwines the stories of a bereaved teenage girl and that of an Italian renaissance artist. The Australian writer, Richard Flanagan completes the list with The Narrow Road to the Deep North centred on the construction of the Thailand-Burma 'death railway', constructed by allied prisoners of war and local forced labour during World War II.
Deciding the prize will be a panel chaired by the philosopher AC Grayling. He is joined on the judging panel by the novelist Jonathan Bate, University of East Anglia literature professor, Sarah Churchwell, neuroscientist Daniel Glaser, Alastair Niven, a former director of literature at the Arts Council and the British Council and the literary editor, Erica Wagner.
The shortlist also reflects the impact of last year's £2.3bn mega-merger to create the biggest book publisher in the world. Five of the six titles are published by Penguin Random House: a dominance no group has achieved before.
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