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Man Booker Prize 2018: time to place your bets on this year’s six finalists

With exemplary novels covering everything from poetry, magical realism and historical horror to choose from, who the judges will deem worthy is anyone’s guess

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Britain’s Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, presents American author George Saunders with the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Fiction in London last year, but who will win it this year? Picture: AFP
James Kidd

Writing in Harper’s Magazine, Will Self, the British novelist, lugubrious man of letters and author of the Man Booker-shortlisted Umbrella (2012), recently declared literary fiction dead, or at least wheezily breathing its last as social media, video games and infinite podcasts dance merrily around its death bed.

In this pessimistic context, the Man Booker is the equiva­lent of an artistic defibrillator, delivering a much-needed, if temporary, life-saving shock to the literary novel’s system.

The prize has found different ways in recent years to grab our increasingly pressed short-term attention, and boost sales of the longlisted and shortlisted works. In 2014, the competi­tion widened its geographical remit from the Common­wealth to the English-writing world, which essentially meant open­ing the prize to the United States: two American writers (Paul Beatty and George Saunders) have won in the inter­vening years, to howls of largely British protest.
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This year, the Man Booker celebrated itself when it tried to find the best winning novel in its 50-year history: the winner, as voted by the reading public, was Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, which, lest it be forgotten, shared the award in 1992 with Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger.

This year, Ondaatje was one of several high-profile writers to fall between the long and shortlist, for his largely excellent Warlight. The other eyebrow-raising omission is Sally Rooney’s much admired Normal People.

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A scene from The English Patient, which was based on Michael Ondaatje’s novel of the same name. The public recently voted the book the best Man Booker winner of the prize’s 50-year history. Picture: Alamy
A scene from The English Patient, which was based on Michael Ondaatje’s novel of the same name. The public recently voted the book the best Man Booker winner of the prize’s 50-year history. Picture: Alamy
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