Candidates for Booker Prize include relative unknowns

London, Oct 13: The winner of Britain's best-known and most coveted literary award, the Man Booker Prize, will be announced on Monday from a shortlist of six including three first timers but only one big name.
With four women and three first novels in the running, 2003 is an unusual vintage.
The bookmakers are tipping Bangladeshi-born Londoner Monica Ali and her first novel Brick Lane, named after a colourful Bangladeshi neighbourhood in east London.
The Canadian author Margaret Atwood, who took the Booker in 2000, is once again a contender with Oryx and Crake.
Many have not made it so far. The initial list of 117 novels, which must be from Commonwealth countries or Ireland, was whittled down to 23 by mid-August, then to six last month.

The chairman of the jury, John Carey, a former professor of literature at Oxford University, read every page of the 117 books in just four and a half months.
The other four judges were not always so studious, he admitted, sometimes stopping after two chapters. And the jury did not always see eye to eye when picking the shortlist.
"It certainly was not unanimous," Carey confided.

"There's always a lot of debate and indecision because people have such different tastes and enthusiasms.

"They are all extremely well written this year. There has been more attention to plot and excitement than in previous years," he told a news agency, without letting slip whose name might be announced.
Bureau Report