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The 2001 Booker Prize- Who Will Take the Prize?

© Diana Adams

The shortlist has been announced for this year's Booker Prize and six authors have made it to the list. Since 1968, The Booker Prize aims to award the best novel of the year. A total of 119 books were in the running for the prestigious award that is open to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth. The winner is to be announced on October 17th. Let's take a look at the shortlist:

• Peter Carey: True History of the Kelly Gang
• Ian McEwan: Atonement
• Andrew Miller: Oxygen
• David Mitchell: Number9dream
• Rachel Seiffert: The Dark Room
• Ali Smith: Hotel World

The award is looking particularly British this year; all of the names except Peter Carey are from Britain. This is causing a few rumblings in the literary arena. Some names sound familiar? They should. Both Ian McEwan ( Amsterdam 1998) and Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda 1988) have both come away with the award before.

Strangely enough, most people expected Beryl Bainbridge to take home the prize this year, but she didn't make it to the short list for her book According to Queeney. This is Bainbridge's seventeenth novel.According to Queeney is a vast historical novel based of the ribald life of Samuel Johnson, the 18th -century scholar through the eyes of his mistress's firstborn daughter Queeney.

Some of the presses called Salman Rushdie's latest Fury an 'early loser', as he didn't make it to the long list, let alone the short list. It should be noted that his book released in August, was barely out of the publisher's gates when the long list was announced. No one, outside the Judges, had read it and it was already positioned as a failure. Salman Rushdie's Midnights Children won the Booker in 1981.

Also missing from the shortlist, Jane Urqhart , who had the Canadian spot on the long list for The Stone Carvers. The Booker Prize was won last year by Canada's leading lady of letters, Margaret Atwood, for The Blind Assassin. Canada's hopes for another win are unfortunately gone.

Who will take the Prize? Whose book will reign supreme? The bets are on Ian McEwan, the master craftsman of fiction, whose his novel Atonement recreates class struggle in the 1930's, and Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang which has been toted 'The Song of Australia'.

Australia will have to sing pretty loud this year, for it competes with nothing less than a well-stacked, yet well deserving, British choir. Next week we will take a look at each contestant on the shortlist, and try to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes a book a literary prize winner.

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