Scots publisher has two eyes on the prize

Published on Friday 15 September 2006 01:03

EDINBURGH firm Canongate was last night celebrating becoming the first Scottish publisher ever to have two novels shortlisted for the £50,000 Man Booker Prize.

Jamie Byng's company, which sensationally won the prize in 2002 with Yann Martel's The Life of Pi, yesterday won two chances to repeat its triumph when its novelists Kate Grenville and Maria Hyndland were placed on the shortlist for the richest prize in British fiction.

The prospects for Grenville, who wrote The Secret River, and Hyland, who wrote Carry Me Down, are boosted by the fact that this is the most open, least predictable Man Booker shortlist for years.

All six books on it have generally been respectfully reviewed, yet none has so far elicited the kind of "buzz" that often marks out a clear Man Booker favourite. Apart from Sarah Waters's The Night Watch, none has enjoyed remarkable sales.

This year, that doesn't matter. The popular successes, the bookies' favourites, have all fallen as spectacularly as horses in a Bechers Brook pile-up.

Double Man Booker winner Peter Carey, former winners Barry Unsworth and Nadime Gordimer, novelists such as Andrew O'Hagan and David Mitchell who have been shortlisted for this and many other prizes, and best-selling writers such as Howard Jacobson have all failed to progress from the longlist as expected.

"I didn't even dare to think we'd get two on the list," Jamie Byng said last night. "I would have been delighted if just one had made the shortlist, though they're both wonderful novels. I'm very, very happy."

Catherine Lockerbie, director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, last night hailed the shortlist as a "hugely imaginative, fascinating choice by a marvellously independent-minded panel of judges".

She said: "We had four out of the six at the book festival. The only reason Kate Grenville wasn't there was that I couldn't get her over from Australia and I almost had Kiran Desai, so we nearly had a clean sweep.

"Personally I'm overjoyed to see Hisham Matar's first novel. I read it some time ago, fell completely in love with it and immediately invited him over to the book festival. To be honest, I didn't think I'd see it on the Man Booker shortlist, but I did realise what a magnificent novel it is.

"It's good to have Edward St Aubyn as well: he's a brilliant English writer and far too little known. MJ Hyndland is an extraordinary writer, too, and it's marvellous to think all these novels will soon be finding the wider readership they deserve."

THE NIGHT WATCH

Sarah Waters

Born: Pembrokeshire, 1966. She is the only one of the six to have made the shortlist before. The story of four Londoners before and after the Second World War is the bookies' favourite to win.

MOTHER'S MILK

Edward St Aubyn

Born: 1960. Family has been part of Cornish aristocracy since Norman Conquest.

The story looks at a once-illustrious family now falling apart through a combination of sexual dysfunction and lies.

IN THE COUNTRY OF MEN

Hisham Matar

Born: New York, 1970. Matar spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo. His debut novel is a rare insight into life under Colonel Gaddafi's dictatorship - seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy.

CARRY ME DOWN

MJ Hyland

Born: London 1968. Spent early childhood in Dublin and emigrated to Australia with family at 11. Canongate's second hope on the shortlist is about an Irish boy who knows when other people are lying.

THE SECRET RIVER

Kate Grenville

Born: Sydney, 1950.

The book, which has won a Commonwealth prize, is the first of Canongate's two chances of winning. It tells the story of a Thames boatman, transported to New South Wales in 1806.

THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS

Kiran Desai

Born: India, 1971. Daughter of Anita Desai, who has been shortlisted for the prize three times. In the book a retired judge's life is thrown into confusion by the arrival of his orphaned grand-daughter.