The first nomination list for the Man Booker International Prize was announced a few months back, and while no Australians were included on the list it is a prize for which Australian are eligible, and for which they can compete against the rest of the literary world. In the most recent "Weekend Australian", Murray Waldren runs his eye over the candidates and gives his winning odds:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez 3/1
Philip Roth 5/1
Margaret Atwood 6/1
Milan Kundera 8/1
Naguib Mahfouz 10/1
Cynthia Ozick 14/1
Gunter Grass 16/1
John Updike 16/1
Kenzaburo Oe 25/1
A.B. Yehoshua 25/1
Ian McEwen 33/1
Stanislaw Lem 40/1
Doris Lessing 50/1
Antonio Tabucchi 50/1
Ismail Kadare 80/1
Muriel Spark 80/1
Tomas Eloy Martinez 120/1
Saul Bellow was a late scratching. The Man International Booker Prize is designed to slot into that gap just below the Nobel in the literary award hierarchy, and is to be awarded every second year. So the question needs to be asked: why include Nobel Laureates on the list? Haven't they been recognized quite enough already? It all seems a bit funny to me. I think it is a response to the suggestion, of a couple of years ago, to open up the annual Man Booker Prize to non-Commonwealth countries. The responses weren't totally negative but neither were they overwhelmingly positive. So it was quietly dropped in favour of the current prize.
