The short list for the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction was announced today, with J.M. Coetzee possibly in line become the first-ever author to win three times (his Life & Times of Michael K and Disgrace scored Bookers in 1983 and 1999, respectively). Coetzee’s Summertime is a finalist, along with A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room. Devastatingly, James Lever’s long-listed novel Me Cheeta, the purported autobiography of a chimpanzee, failed to make the cut; we’d really liked to have seen what a fictional monkey would’ve done with the $83,000 cash prize.
Coetzee, Byatt on Short List for Man Booker Prize [ArtsBeat/NYT]
