Irish author John Banville beat higher-profile favourites Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith to become the surprise winner of Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for fiction late on Monday.
The 59-year-old was handed the £50 000 award — and the massive rise in sales which inevitably follows — for The Sea, described by the judges as ”a masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected”.
Bookmakers had made Banville a 7-1 outsider for what is Britain’s best-known literary prize, also one of the most prestigious annual awards in the world for a single work of fiction.
This year’s favourite had been British author Julian Barnes for his novel Arthur and George, followed by 1989 Booker winner Kazuo Ishiguro and 29-year-old British prodigy Zadie Smith.
Instead, the judges said they had been torn between Banville’s work and Never Let Me Go, the latest novel by Japanese-born British writer Ishiguro, with chairperson of the judging panel John Sutherland having to cast the deciding vote.
”In an extraordinarily closely contested last round, in which the judges felt the level of the shortlisted novels was as high as it can ever have been, they have agreed to award the Man Booker Prize to John Banville’s The Sea, a masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected,” Sutherland said. ”The judges salute all the shortlisted novels.”
It had been ”a very difficult decision”, Sutherland said, in deciding a winner from the six-strong shortlist, which also included The Accidental by Ali Smith and A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry.
”These are six extremely different novels, all of them good in a very different way,” Sutherland said. ”The discussions honestly could have gone on for three days. Whether it would have come out in a different decision I don’t know; I hope it wouldn’t.”
Banville’s win marks a form of revenge for the Irish writer, whose earlier work The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize but lost out to Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.
The winning novel, his 14th, is narrated by Max Morden, a middle-aged arts historian mourning the recent death of his wife from cancer.
He returns to the Irish seaside town where he spent a childhood summer and recalls the traumatic events that have haunted him ever since.
Accepting his prize, Banville called the award ”a great surprise and a great pleasure”.
He added: ”I do say to my colleagues: just hang in there, it will come. I hung around for many years.”
Along with Ishiguro, Banville’s main rivals are far better known in Britain, with Barnes receiving his third nomination for the Booker.
Smith, meanwhile, is renowned as one of the country’s best young writers, with her shortlisted book On Beauty being her third novel, all of them highly praised.
The Booker Prize, now in its 37th year, is awarded every October for the best work of fiction by a British, Irish or Commonwealth author. — Sapa-AFP