Will this expatriate Bengali make it the fifth time for an Indian-origin writer?
By Sujeet Rajan
WASHINGTON, DC: The Man Booker Prize judges seem to be in love with the Calcutta of the sixties, with themes of domestic rifts in families and communism: last year Jhumpa Lahiri made the long list with her novel The Lowland; this year it’s Indo-British author Neel Mukherjee’s turn to be in contention with his novel The Lives of Others, which has cleared the first hurdle. Come to think of it, juxtapose the titles to the two novels, and it would still seem appropriate to the storyline of both.
Like Lahiri’s The Lowland, The Kolkata-born, British citizen Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others, is his second novel, published in May of this year by Chatto & Windus. It’s yet to be released in the US.
It’s the third consecutive year that an Indian-origin writer has featured in the long list for the prize, with the now Mumbai-based Jeet Thayil making the cut in 2012 for Narcopolis.
Mukherjee’s first novel, Past Continuous (Picador India, 2008), was joint winner of the Vodafone-Crossword Award, India’s version of the US National Book Award for fiction, along with Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.
Past Continuous, when published in the UK, went on to win the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for Best Fiction and was shortlisted for the inaugural DSC Prize for South Asian Fiction and the Southbank Sky Arts Award.
A total of 154 books were entered for this year’s Man Booker Prize, with 44 of those titles eligible by way of new rule changes, whereby American authors and all others writing in English, outside of the UK and the Commonwealth, were also allowed to be in contention. The winner receives a prize of £50,000 and, more importantly, immediate recognition worldwide, with increase in book sales and publishing of the book guaranteed in several other countries.
Only four Indian writers have ever won the Man Booker Prize, which was earlier known as the Booker Prize: Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Aravind Adiga and Kiran Desai.
Rushdie was the first one to win it, for Midnight’s Children, in 1981. It was also awarded the ‘Booker of Bookers’ prize in 1993 and 2008 to celebrate the Booker Prize’s 25th and 40th anniversary, respectively.
Roy won for perhaps one of the most exhilarating novels to ever come out of India: The God of Small Things, in 1997. Kiran Desai followed up, clinching the prize in 2006, for The Inheritance of Loss. Her mother Anita Desai had been thrice shortlisted for the Booker herself. Adiga’s The White Tiger won the prize in 2009.
The 13 novels in the long list for the 2014 Man Booker Prize:
- History of the Rain by Niall Williams
- How to be Both by Ali Smith.
- J by Howard Jacobson.
- Orfeo by Richard Powers.
- The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt.
- The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.
- The Dog by Joseph O’Neill.
- The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee.
- The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan.
- The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth.
- To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris.
- Us by David Nicholls.
- We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler.