Booker Prize 2013: Shortlist announced

The Man Booker Prize shortlist for 2013 has been announced, whittling July’s 13-strong longlist down to just six titles that remain in the running for the £50k purse.

Chief judge Robert MacFarlane hailed this year’s list as “the most diverse in recent memory”, encompassing novelists from England, Ireland, Canada, Zimbabwe and New Zealand, with books ranging in their settings from the biblical Middle East via 19^th century New Zealand mining country to modern day Tokyo.

Jim Crace’s novel Harvest, set in a rural village in England during the passing of the Enclosure Acts, remains the bookies’ favourite after being hotly tipped in July. Crace has said the novel, his eleventh, will be the last work of fiction he publishes.

By contrast, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, set partly in Zimbabwe during the 2008 election, is the author’s first book and the only debut novel on the list.

Jhumpa Lahiri – despite living in the US since the age of two and previously winning a Pulitzer Prize with her debut short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies – was born in London and holds dual citizenship, allowing her second novel The Lowland to make the shortlist, which is only open to citizens of the Commonwealth, Ireland or Zimbabwe.

Macfarlane’s fellow judges are broadcaster Martha Kearney, author Stuart Kelley and critics Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Natalie Haynes. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in London on 15^th October.  

The Shortlist (odds by Ladbrokes)

The Harvest by Jim Crace (Picador) – odds to win: 5/2

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín (Penguin) – odds: 7/2

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (Granta) odds: 4/1

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (Canongate) – odds: 5/1

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo (Chatto & Windus) – odds: 6/1

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (Bloomsbury) – odds: 6/1

Richard Woolley

For further information about the Man Booker Prize visit here.