After months of waiting and debating, the winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize has been announced. From a strong shortlist of six contenders, bookies’ favourite Hilary Mantel has won the award for her novel about Thomas Cromwell titled Wolf Hall. Congratulations!Publisher: Fourth Estate Ltd / ISBN: 9780007230181 / Price: R296.00
Much has been written about the Tudors and the reign of King Henry VIII, both in the realm of fiction and non-fiction, and in recent years public interest in the subject has grown overwhelmingly. Mantel, who is no stranger to literary awards, knew that, because of this, writing her account of the era would be "difficult". "I had to interest the historians, I had to amuse the jaded palate of the critical establishment and most of all I had to capture the imagination of the general reader," she said in her acceptance speech last night.
She appears to have succeeded. Chairman of the judging panel, James Naughtie, lauded the book for its "sheer bigness", which he attributed to the "boldness of its narrative" and "its scene setting". He went on to describe it as an "extraordinary piece of story-telling", an echo of the justification for last year’s winner, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, which gives some idea of what the judges look for in a winner. Among the unsuccessful contenders for this year’s award were JM Coetzee for his novel Summertime and AS Byatt for The Children’s Book.
