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(From top) The books
shortlisted for this
year’s Booker, Amitav
Ghosh, Aravind
Adiga’s The White
Tiger |
Two books by Indian authors — Sea of Poppies by Calcutta-born Amitav Ghosh and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, a debut novelist from Chennai — have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
There was bitter disappointment for Pakistani author Mohammed Hanif, whose much-fancied A Case of Exploding Mangoes was on the long-list of 13 novels announced in July and was being talked about as the probable winner.
Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence was on the long-list and also proceeded no further.
The chairman of the judging panel, Michael Portillo, a former Tory MP and cabinet minister, today said the book “was not one of the six books for us. It does not mean it would not be for anybody else. It easily could be.”
The four other novels that have made it to the shortlist are The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry, The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant, The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher, and A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz.
The winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced live on television on October 14 from a dinner at the Guildhall, London, when the five losing authors will have to go through the ritual humiliation of cheering the winner.
Will India win again? A one-in-three chance is the smart answer but India certainly has form.
Indian-origin authors V.S. Naipaul, Rushdie (who has twice won the Booker of Bookers with Midnight’s Children), Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai have all triumphed in the past.
Apart from Portillo, the judges include Alex Clark, the editor of Granta, Louise Doughty, a novelist, James Heneage, the founder of Ottakar’s bookshops, and Hardeep Singh Kohli, a radio broadcaster.
Even to get on the shortlist is a remarkable achievement since the judges start the selection process with about 100 novels and toss out well-known authors as they whittle down their choices to 13 and then to six.
“The judges commend the six titles to readers with great enthusiasm,” said Portillo. “These novels are intensely readable, each of them an extraordinary example of imagination and narrative. These fine page-turning stories nonetheless raise highly thought-provoking ideas and issues. These books are in every case both ambitious and approachable. Booksellers should be pretty pleased with this list.”
According to the publishers, Sea of Poppies (John Murray, £18.99), by Ghosh, is set just before the Opium Wars.
“This novel has at its heart an old slaving-ship, The Ibis, and its crew, a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman. As their old family ties are washed away they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races and generations.”
The author was born in Calcutta on July 11, 1956, and grew up in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India. “He studied at the universities of Delhi and Oxford. He has taught at a number of institutions, most recently Harvard, and has written for many publications.... He currently divides his time between Calcutta, Goa and Brooklyn.”
Even before today’s announcement of the shortlist, The White Tiger (Atlantic Books; £12.99) by Adiga was “doing well”, a spokeswoman for his publisher said.
She added: “This changes everything in terms of book sales around the world.”
This is the plot of the novel: “Born in the heartland of India to the son of a rickshaw-puller, Balram Halwai, the ‘White Tiger’, dreams of escaping his life as a teashop worker-turned-chauffeur. Yet when his chance finally arrives and his eyes are opened to the revelatory city of New Delhi, Balram becomes caught between his instinct to be a loyal son and servant and his desire to better himself.
“As he passes through two different Indias on his journey from the darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success, he begins to realise how the Tiger might finally escape his cage, and he is not afraid to spill a little blood along the way.”
Adiga, who now lives in Mumbai, was born in what was then Madras on October 23, 1974, and raised partly in Australia. He studied at Columbia and Oxford universities and is a former correspondent for Time magazine in India.
Courtesy: The Telegraph
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