ONE of the surest signs that autumn is on its way is the eruption of the annual brouhaha over the shortlist of five novels for the Man Booker prize, worth £50,000 to the winner. The Booker, Britain's most prestigious literary award, is open to published novels written in English by authors from the Commonwealth or Ireland. This year's furor centers on the omission of Sir Salman Rushdie's novel “The Enchantress of Florence”, from the shortlist. But the chairman of the five judges, former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Portillo, said, “In the opinion of these five people taken together, Salman Rushdie's was not one of the top six books for us. We didn't have a big debate about it.” Yet Rushdie's failure to make the shortlist comes two months after he won the “Best of Bookers” for “Midnight's Children”, which won the Booker in 1981. The award was for the best winner in the 40 years of the prize's existence. “Midnight's Children” had previously won the “Booker of Bookers”, which marked the Booker's 25th anniversary in 1993. Two major firms of bookmakers, William Hill and Ladbrokes, were astounded that neither Rushdie nor their other hot favorite, Joseph O'Neill, made the shortlist. The Irish-Turkish O'Neill had been on the Booker longlist of 13 books for his much-lauded post 9/11 novel “Netherland”. The bookies hastily recalculated their odds. William Hill have placed Sebastian Barry as 2/1 favorite to win with “Sacred Scripture.” Ladbrokes are tipping first-time Indian novelist Aravind Adiga's “The White Tiger” to win, closely followed by Linda Grant's “The Clothes on Their Backs.” Portillo's fellow judges are the editor of Granta Alex Clark, novelist Louise Doughty, the founder of Ottakar's bookshops James Heneage, and the TV and radio broadcaster Hardeep Singh Kohli. They will choose the winning novel on October 14, the day of the prize-giving dinner. Some literary pundits think this year's judges have moved the prize downmarket by stressing accessibility and readability over style. But Louise Doughty defended the judges' choices and said, “The ability to come up with a good plot and create a good structure are great literary qualities – it is not just about how to make a finely turned sentence.” Portillo said the judges “commend the six titles to readers with great enthusiasm. 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.” The judges read over 112 entries. Their shortlist includes two novels by Indian authors: Aravind Adiga's “The White Tiger” and “Sea of Poppies” by Amitav Ghosh. “The White Tiger” is written in the form of letters from a murderous chauffeur, maddened by social inequalities and corruption in the new India, to the Chinese premier. “Sea of Poppies” is set in North India in 1838 at the time of the opium wars. “The Secret Scripture” by Irishman Sebastian Barry is a history of Ireland recounted through the parallel memories of a very old woman in a psychiatric hospital and of her psychiatrist. British-Jewish writer Linda Grant's “The Clothes on Their Backs” tells the story of Jewish-Hungarian refugees who arrived in Britain just before the Second World War, seen from the point of view of a niece whose flashy, disreputable uncle ends up being jailed. “The Northern Clemency” by British writer Philip Hensher is a compendious novel depicting the interlocked histories of two families in the northern English city of Sheffield over two decades from 1974. “A Fraction of the Whole” by Australian author Steve Toltz is a sweeping picaresque narrative spanning continents. Adiga and Toltz are first-time novelists, showing that the judges have been keen to find new voices. The fact that it is the prize's 40th anniversary means it has a particularly high profile this year. An exhibition on the prize is being held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and there is a season of film adaptations of Booker novels at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. Earlier this month the Guardian Saturday Review carried a lengthy report on the history of the prize, headed ‘Tears, tiffs and triumphs', with contributions by judges from each of its 40 years. George Steiner recalls how when he was a judge in 1972, “I fought very hard for John Berger to win for ‘G', and then he threw it in my face by giving half the prize money to the Black Panthers” (the US Black Power organization). Novelist Beryl Bainbridge (who has been shortlisted for the prize five times without winning) remembered how at the final judges' meeting in 1977 she got “terribly tired, I literally sank lower and lower under the table” while the American writer Brandan Gill “went towards the balcony saying he was going to throw himself off, he was so fed up.” In 1991 judge Nicholas Mosley resigned and stormed out after failing to get any of his choices included on the shortlist. Writer and editor author Jason Cowley says he has never quite recovered from his experience of being a judge in 1997. “I began the year as an enthusiastic reader and reviewer of contemporary fiction and ended it much more interested in non-fiction and narrative journalism.” The Booker stable of literary prizes was expanded last year to include an Arab prize – the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), worth $50,000 to the winner, plus $10,000 for each of the six shortlisted authors. IPAF was launched in Abu Dhabi in 2007 as a collaborative effort by the Booker Prize Foundation, the Emirates Foundation and the Weidenfeld Institute for Strategic Dialogue. In contrast to the Man Booker, whose judges are announced at the beginning of each year's judging process, the identity of the judges for IPAF in its first year were kept secret until they announced their shortlist at a press conference in January. IPAF explained the secrecy was necessary so as “to ensure the independence and integrity of the selection process.” But should one really assume that the Arab literary world is somehow so backward that judges must be shielded from possible interference in this way? The winning novel, Egyptian Baha Taher's “Sunset Oasis”, was announced in Abu Dhabi in March. The judging process for the second year of IPAF is now under way, with the identity of the judges once again undisclosed. Shortly before the deadline of July 31 for submission of novels, the IPAF administrator, Lebanese poet and journalist Joumana Haddad, announced that so far novels had been received from 13 Arab countries. In its first year IPAF received 131 submissions from 18 Arab countries. A major aim of IPAF is to encourage translation of Arabic fiction. The English translation of “Sunset Oasis” is being executed by the acclaimed translator Humphrey Davies, with funding from philanthropist and publisher Sigrid Rausing. It will be published in the UK by the Hodder & Stoughton imprint Spectre in late summer 2009. The other five shortlisted authors shortlisted have also had contracts or offers for translation of their shortlisted novels. For example, “June Rain” by the Lebanese Jabbour Douaihy is to be published by Dar Al Shorook in Egypt, and is being translated into French for publication by a leading publisher of translated literature, Actes Sud. __
