The literary world awaits the announcement of this year’s Booker Prize winner on Monday evening, as six acclaimed authors vie for one of the most prestigious honors in English-language fiction. Among the contenders, British novelist Andrew Miller and Indian writer Kiran Desai have emerged as frontrunners, with bookmakers tipping one of the two seasoned authors to claim the £50,000 award at a ceremony in London.
The winner of the Booker Prize will be announced on Monday, with six novels competing for the prestigious English-language literary award and two veterans favored by bookmakers.
British author Andrew Miller, who has previously been shortlisted, and Indian author Kiran Desai, the 2006 Booker winner, were predicted to scoop the award at the London ceremony.
It would be Desai's second win with her epic love story, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.
The 700-page novel is the longest vying for the prize, and took Desai nearly two decades to write.
The shortlist, selected by a judging panel that included chair and former winner Roddy Doyle and Sex and the City actor Sarah Jessica Parker, features authors of four different nationalities.
The winner of the £50,000 ($65,500) prize is due to be announced later Monday at a glitzy ceremony in London.
Last year's prize was won by British writer Samantha Harvey for her short novel, Orbital, following six astronauts as they contemplate Earth from the International Space Station.
The Booker is often considered a talent spotter, but this year's shortlist mostly features authors with at least five books under their belt.
As well as one previous winner, two other authors on this year's list, David Szalay and Miller, have also made the shortlist before.
Oddschecker, a leading betting odds comparison site, on Monday had Miller's The Land in Winter as the 6/4 favorite, followed by Desai as second favorite with 2/1 odds.
'Sheer Bounty'
Two decades after she won in 2006 with The Inheritance of Loss, Desai's shortlisted novel is an epic about love, family, immigration, and modern loneliness.
Set in the mid-1990s, Desai has described her novel as a "present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty."
"This book is a lot about painful loneliness but also about the solace of being alone," Desai said during an event on Sunday before the prize ceremony.
The Booker panel noted it for its "rich intricacies and the sheer bounty each page offers."
Miller's novel explores the tensions within two marriages shaped by Britain's so-called Big Freeze of 1962 as they navigate personal and seismic post-war changes.
As winter deepens its icy grip, the lives of the protagonists start to unravel in a compelling and atmospheric snapshot of a country teetering on the brink of profound cultural change but still reckoning with the past.
In Flesh, meanwhile, British-Hungarian Szalay follows up his 2016 Booker-shortlisted All That Man Is with another tautly written, largely unflattering exploration of masculinity.
Others on the shortlist are US-born Susan Choi for Flashlight, which tells the story of a family whose life is forever changed by a disappearance.
The novel blends family narrative with reflections on identity, absence, and secrets, set against a backdrop of the phenomenon of abductions of Japanese citizens by North Korea in the 1970s and 80s.
Katie Kitamura's Audition also made the cut with her tense and at times unsettling novel about how an actress's life is thrown into disarray after she meets a young, troubling man for lunch.
The story of two halves dissects relationships and questions how much of our lives are a performance and how well we really know our loved ones.
The Rest Of Our Lives by British-American author and former professional basketball player Ben Markovits completes the list with his tale of a midlife crisis and the challenges of long-term marriage.
With AFP
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