Follow Up - Man Booker Prize Information

Man Booker extends net to US judges as well as novelists
Two US-born judges join Booker panel as prize opens entry to all English-language authors

by Richard Lea
(The Guardian)

In the year the Man Booker prize finally admits US novelists, the judging meeting for the UK's premier literary award will take on a transatlantic air. Two of the judges charged with finding 2014's finest fiction written in English were born in the US, a figure which matches the number of American Booker judges over the past 10 years.

The chair of the judges AC Grayling is joined on the panel by the critic Sarah Churchwell, an Oxford professor of English, born in Illinois, and the former literary editor of the Times, Erica Wagner, born in New York.

The panel, which this year will consider English-language authors of any nationality, also gains an additional member. The chair of the judges AC Grayling is joined by another English professor, Jonathan Bate, neuroscientist Daniel Glaser and former director of literature at both the arts council and the British Council, Alastair Niven.

Grayling welcomed the task of finding the best full-length fiction published all around the world, a job he said the judges were launching into "with relish".

"The challenge for my fellow judges and me is an exciting one, and I'm delighted to have such an outstanding group of people to work with in this highly significant year for the prize," he said.

Judges will be reading submissions both in hard copy and on tablet computers, but with entries limited to publishers "formally established in the UK", the prize's literary director Ion Trewin, isn't expecting a flood of new entries, despite the increased pool of authors.

"The number of books that will be submitted won't change," he said. "The publishers can't double the number of books."

Last year's exclusively British and Irish panel, chaired by the Nottinghamshire-born writer Robert Macfarlane, chose the New Zealander Eleanor Catton's novel The Luminaries.

The 2014 longlist will be announced in late July, with a shortlist of six books revealed in early September. The 2014 Booker prize will be awarded at a central London ceremony on 14 October 2014.