Australian novelist Richard Flanagan won the first Man Booker Prize that allowed American nominees for his book The Narrow Road to the Deep North. This is the first time that the award has been open to the authors around the world including the Americans whose work is originally written in English. Earlier it was open for the authors from United Kingdom and Commonwealth nations.
With this award Flanagan became the third Australian to win this award. Others Australian winners are Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey 2001 and 1988.
According to the judges of the Prize Flanagan s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which is set during the construction of the Thailand-Burma Death Railway in World War Two, is a magnificent novel of love and war.
Other novelists who were shortlisted for the prize were Ali Smith for How to be Both, Howard Jacobson for J, Neel Mukherjee for The Lives of Others, Joshua Ferris for To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, and Karen Joy Fowler for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
Some interesting facts:• The Man Booker Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Booker-McConnell Prize, after the company Booker-McConnell began is sponsoring the event in 1968
• Originally the prize money was £21,000, but in 2002 it was raised to £50,000 under the sponsorship of the Man Group, making it one of the world s richest literary prizes.
• Bernice Rubens is the first woman Booker Prize winner. She won the prize for The Elected Member in 1970.
• Till now only three Indians have won the Man Booker prize. They are Arundhati Roy for The God of Small Things in 1997, Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss in 2006 and Aravind Adiga for The White Tiger in 2008.
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