Heute wurde die Longlist zum Man Booker Prize 2009 veröffentlicht. Der Man Booker Prize wird seit 1969 für einen englischsprachigen Roman eines Schriftstellers aus Großbritannien, Irland oder dem Commonwealth vergeben, er ist der wichtigste britische Literaturpreis und mit 50.000 Pfund Sterling dotiert.

Seit 2005 wird außerdem der Man Booker International Prize verliehen (Preisgeld 60.000 Pfund), mit dem ein Autor beliebiger Nationalität für sein auf Englisch verfügbares (Gesamt-)Werk ausgezeichnet wird. Dieser Preis wird alle zwei Jahre vergeben. Preisträgerin des Man Booker International 2009 ist die kanadische Autorin Alice Munro, die für ihren Erzählband Too much happiness (deutschsprachiger Titel: Wozu wollen Sie das wissen?) ausgezeichnet wurde.

Unter der Leitung von James Naughtie wird die 4-köpfige Jury am 08. September 2009 aus den 13 nominierten Romanen der Longlist  eine Shortlist zusammenstellen. Daraus  wird am 06. Oktober 2009 der Gewinner oder die Gewinnerin des Man Booker 2009 ermittelt und in der Guildhall in London verliehen.

Die Nominierten in alphabetischer Reihenfolge:

The Children†™s Book von Antonia  S. Byatt

Kurzbeschreibung
Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed with her children gathered at her knee. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world – but their lives, and those of their rich cousins, children of a city stockbroker, and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries their own secrets. Into their world comes a young stranger, a working-class boy from the potteries, drawn by the beauty of the Museum’s treasures. And in midsummer a German puppeteer arrives, bringing dark dramas. The world seems full of promise but the calm is already rocked by political differences, by Fabian arguments about class and free love , by the idealism of anarchists from Russia and Germany. The sons rebel against their parents‘ plans; the girls dream of independent futures, becoming doctors or fighting for the vote. This vivid, rich and moving saga is played out against the great, rippling tides of the day, taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme. Born at the end of the Victorian era, growing up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, a whole generation grew up unaware of the darkness ahead. In their innocence, they were betrayed unintentionally by the adults who loved them. In a profound sense, this novel is indeed the children’s book.

Über die Autorin
A.S. Byatt is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short story-writer and critic. Her books include Possession, and the quartet of The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman. She was appointed DBE in 1999.

Summertime von J M Coetzee

Kurzbeschreibung
A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was ‚finding his feet as a writer‘. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him – a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time. Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, „Summertime“ shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with „Boyhood“ and „Youth“.

Über den Autor
J.M. Coetzee, geboren 1940 in Kapstadt, stammt aus einer Afrikaaner-Familie, wurde jedoch englischsprachig erzogen. 1962 verließ er erstmals Südafrika, um bei IBM in Großbritannien als Programmierer zu arbeiten. 1965 zog er in die USA, wo er 1969 über Beckett promovierte. Er kehrte 1972 als Literaturprofessor nach Südafrika zurück. Der internationale Durchbruch gelang ihm 1980 mit „Waiting for the Barbarians“. Er wurde für seine Romane mit zahlreichen Preisen ausgezeichnet, u.a. zweimal mit dem Booker Prize. 2003 erhielt Coetzee den Nobelpreis für Literatur.

The Quickening Maze von Adam Foulds

Kurzbeschreibung
Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, „The Quickening Maze“ centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum – an institution run on reformist principles which would later become known as occupational therapy. At the same time another poet, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and becomes entangled in the life and catastrophic schemes of the asylum’s owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr Matthew Allen. For John Clare, a man who had grown up steeped in the freedoms and exhilarations of nature, who thought ‚the edge of the world was a day’s walk away‘, a locked door is a kind of death. This intensely lyrical novel describes his vertiginous fall, through hallucinatory episodes of insanity and dissolving identity, towards his final madness. Historically accurate, but brilliantly imagined, the closed world of High Beach and its various inmates – the doctor, his lonely daughter in love with Tennyson, the brutish staff and John Clare himself – are brought vividly to life. Outside the walls is Nature, and Clare’s paradise: the birds and animals, the gypsies living in the forest; his dream of home, of redemption, of escape. Rapturous yet precise, exquisitely written, rich in character and detail, this is a remarkable and deeply affecting book: a visionary novel which contains a world.

How to Paint a Dead Man von Sarah Hall

Kurzbeschreibung
The lives of four individuals†”a dying painter, a blind girl, a landscape artist, and an art curator†”intertwine across nearly five decades in this luminous and searching novel of extraordinary power. With How to Paint a Dead Man, Sarah Hall, „one of the most significant and exciting of Britain’s young novelists“ (The Guardian), delivers „a maddeningly enticing read . . . an amazing feat of literary engineering“ (The Independent on Sunday).

The Wilderness von Samantha Harvey

Kurzbeschreibung
It’s Jake’s birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life – his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn’t quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer’s. As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? What went so wrong in his life? There was a cherry tree once, and a yellow dress, but what exactly do they mean? As Jake, assisted by ‚poor Eleanor‘, a childhood friend with whom for some unfathomable reason he seems to be sleeping, fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tries to grasp them, and what until recently seemed solid fact is melting into surreal dreams or nightmarish imaginings. Is there anything he’ll be able to salvage from the wreckage? Beauty, perhaps, the memory of love, or nothing at all? From the first sentence to the last, The Wilderness holds us in its grip. This is writing of extraordinary power and beauty.

Über die Autorin
Samantha Harvey was born in England in 1975. She has lived in Ireland, New Zealand and Japan writing, travelling and teaching, and in recent years has co-founded an environmental charity alongside her novel writing. She completed with distinction the Bath Spa Creative Writing MA course in 2005, where she was shortlisted for the PFD prize. The Wilderness is her first novel.

Me Cheeta von James Lever

Kurzbeschreibung
The incredible, moving and hilarious story of Cheeta the Chimp, simian star of the big screen, on a behind-the-scenes romp through the golden years of Hollywood. The greatest Hollywood Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, died in 1984. Maureen O’Sullivan, his Jane, died in 1998. Weissmuller’s son, who first played Boy in the 1939 film ‚Tarzan Finds a Mate‘, has gone too. But Cheeta the Chimp, who starred with them all, is alive and well, retired in Palm Springs as an abstract painter. At the incredible age of seventy-six, he is by far the oldest living chimpanzee ever recorded. Now, in this extraordinary debut novel, James Lever uncovers the astonishing tale of Cheeta! Cheeta was just a baby when snatched from the Liberian jungle in 1932, by the great animal importer Henry Trefflich, who went on to supply NASA with its ‚Monkeys for Space‘ programme. That same year, Cheeta appeared in ‚Tarzan the Ape Man‘, and in 1934 ‚Tarzan and His Mate‘, in which he famously stole the clothes from a naked O’Sullivan, dripping wet from an underwater swimming scene with Weissmuller. Full of humour, wit and emotion, James Lever’s novel tells the truly unique tale of a monkey stolen from deepest Africa and forced to make a living among the fake jungles and outrageous stars of Hollywood’s golden age. Cheeta’s tinseltown journey extends beyond the screen, to his struggle with drink and addiction to cigars, his breakthrough with a radical new form of abstract painting, ‚Apeism‘, his touching relationship with his retired nightclub-performing grandson Jeeta, now a considerable artist in his own right, his fondness for hamburgers and his battle in later life with diabetes, and, through thick and thin, carer Dan Westfall, his loving companion who has helped this magnificent monkey come to terms with his peculiar past. Funny, moving — and so searingly honest, you know it has to be fiction — ‚Me Cheeta‘ transports us back to a lost Hollywood. Cheeta is a real star, and this is the greatest celebrity non-memoir of recent times!

Wolf Hall von Hilary Mantel

Kurzbeschreibung
‚Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,‘ says Thomas More, ‚and when you come back that night he’ll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks‘ tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.‘ England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey’s clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages. From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.

The Glass Room von Simon Mawer

Kurzbeschreibung
Cool. Balanced. Modern. The precisions of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession and the fear of failure – these are things that happen in the Glass Room. High on a Czechoslovak hill, the Landauer House shines as a wonder of steel and glass and onyx built specially for newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a Jew married to a gentile. But the radiant honesty of 1930 that the house, with its unique Glass Room, seems to engender quickly tarnishes as the storm clouds of WW2 gather, and eventually the family must flee, accompanied by Viktor’s lover and her child. But the house’s story is far from over, and as it passes from hand to hand, from Czech to Russian, both the best and the worst of the history of Eastern Europe becomes somehow embodied and perhaps emboldened within the beautiful and austere surfaces and planes so carefully designed, until events come full-circle.

Über den Autor
Simon Mawer was born in 1948 in England, and spent his childhood there, in Cyprus and in Malta. He now lives with his wife and two children in Italy, and teaches at the English School in Rome.

Not Untrue & Not Unkind von Ed O†™Loughlin

Kurzbeschreibung
In Dublin, a newspaper editor called Cartwright is found dead. One of his colleagues, Owen Simmons, discovers a dossier on Cartwright’s desk. And in the dossier Owen finds a photograph, which brings him back to a dusty road in Africa and to the woman he once loved! „Not Untrue and Not Unkind“ is Owen’s story – a gripping story of friendship, rivalry and betrayal amongst a group of journalists and photographers covering Africa’s wars. It is an astonishingly powerful and accomplished debut that immediately establishes Ed O’Loughlin as a mature master of the novel form.

Über den Autor
Ed O’Loughlin was born in Toronto and raised in Ireland. He reported from Africa for the Irish Times and other papers, and was Middle East correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age of Melbourne. Not Untrue and Not Unkind is his first novel.

Heliopolis von James Scudamore

Kurzbeschreibung
As a child Ludo is plucked out of the shantytown where he was born and transported to a world of languid, cosseted luxury. Now twenty-seven, he works high above the sprawling metropolis of Sao Paulo for a vacuous ‚communications company‘. But this is not his world, and this is not a simple rags-to-riches story: Ludo’s destiny moves him around like a chess piece, showing him both extremities of opulent excess and abject poverty, taking him to the brink of madness and brutality.

Über den Autor
James Scudamore was born in 1976 and grew up in Japan, Brazil and the UK. His first novel, The Amnesia Clinic, won the 2007 Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers‘ Prize. He lives in London.

Brooklyn von Colm Toibin

Kurzbeschreibung
Eine irische Kleinstadt in den 1950er-Jahren: Wie viele andere ihrer Generation findet auch Eilis Lacey zu Hause keine Arbeit. Als sie eine Stelle in Amerika angeboten bekommt, ist klar, dass sie ihre Heimat verlassen muss. Also nimmt Eilis Abschied von ihrer Familie und macht sich auf den Weg, um sich in Brooklyn ein neues Leben aufzubauen. Die junge Frau ist einsam und hat Heimweh, doch mit der Zeit gelingt es ihr, den Schmerz zu verarbeiten. Dabei hilft ihr der neue Alltag: Tagsüber arbeitet sie an der Kasse eines großen Kaufhauses, abends besucht sie Kurse am Brooklyn College und den Freitagabend verbringt sie auf der Tanzfläche des Gemeindesaals. Irgendwann stellt Eilis fest, dass sie auf eine gewisse Art ihr Glück gefunden hat. Doch dann kommen schlimme Nachrichten und sie muss zurück nach Irland. Als sich dort plötzlich ganz neue Möglichkeiten eröffnen, steht Eilis vor einer schweren Entscheidung. Sie muss eine Wahl treffen: zwischen Glück und Liebe in dem Land, in das sie gehört, und den Versprechen, die sie auf der anderen Seite des Ozeans halten muss.
‚Brooklyn‘ ist eine warmherzige Geschichte über große Liebe und schwere Verluste und über die schwere Wahl zwischen Pflicht und persönlicher Freiheit. Mit Eilis Lacey hat Colm Tóibín eine außergewöhnliche Heldin geschaffen und mit ‚Brooklyn‘ einen Roman von ungeheurer emotionaler Wucht.

Love and Summer von William Trevor

Liebe und Sommer erscheint in der deutschsprachigen Übersetzung am 17. September 2009 im Verlag Hoffmann und Campe. Die 220 Seiten umfassende gebundene Ausgabe kostet 19,99 Euro.

Kurzbeschreibung
Mit einer Tschechow´schen Note von Verlust und Sehnsucht erzählt William Trevor eindringlich von der Liebe eines Sommers.

Florian Kilderry hält sich im ländlichen Rathmoyes auf, um den Besitz seiner verstorbenen Eltern aufzulösen. Als er mit seiner Kamera die Gegend durchstreift, trifft er auf die Trauergäste einer Beerdigung, unter denen auch Ellie Dillahan ist. Der unabhängige Mann und die verheiratete Farmersfrau fühlen sich spontan zueinander hingezogen und treffen sich fortan heimlich auf einem abgelegenen Anwesen. Ellie ist hin- und hergerissen zwischen ihrem eintönigen, aber sicheren Leben an der Seite ihres Mannes auf dem Hof und den Verlockungen, die der geheimnisvolle Unbekannte verheißt. Auch wenn sich die beiden in ihrem Geheimnis sicher wähnen, bleibt ihre Affäre von einigen Bewohnern Rathmoyes´nicht unbemerkt.

Über den Autor
William Trevors umfangreiches Werk umfasst Romane und Erzählungen und wurde mit zahlreichen literarischen Preisen ausgezeichnet. Sein letzter Roman »Die Geschichte der Lucy Gault« (2003) war für den Booker Prize nominiert. Bei Hoffmann und Campe erschienen außerdem die Erzählungsbände »Seitensprung« (2005), »Tod des Professors« (2007) und »Geborgtes Glück« (2008). Der Roman »Felicias Reise«
erschien 2009 in einer komplett überarbeiteten Übersetzung.

The Little Stranger von Sarah Waters

Kurzbeschreibung
After her award-winning trilogy of Victorian novels, Sarah Waters turned to the 1940s and wrote THE NIGHT WATCH, a tender and tragic novel set against the backdrop of wartime Britain. Shortlisted for both the Orange and the Man Booker, it went straight to number one in the bestseller chart. In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his. Prepare yourself. From this wonderful writer who continues to astonish us, now comes a chilling ghost story.

Über die Autorin
Sarah Waters wurde 1966 in Wales geboren. Sie hat in englischer Literatur promoviert und zahlreiche Artikel in Kultur- und Literaturzeitschriften veröffentlicht. 1998 erhielt sie den New London Writers Award des London Arts Board. Buchveröffentlichungen, Auszeichnung mit dem Times Young Novelist of the Year Award und den Somerset Maugham Award.

Quelle: The Man Booker Prize