Byatt, Waters up for 2009 Booker Prize

Authors Colm Tobin, J.M. Coetzee, A.S. Byatt and Sarah Waters were among the nominees for the 2009 Man Booker Prize announced in England Wednesday.

We believe it to be one of the strongest lists in recent memory, the BBC quoted James Naughtie, chair of the judges, as saying about this year’s roster of nominees for the fiction award.

We considered more than 130 novels and found ourselves traveling in a fertile landscape, Naughtie explained. We kept discovering new talent, as well as reacquainting ourselves with familiar writers, and emerged with a feeling that we were part of an exceptional year. … This is an eclectic list, taking us from the court of Henry VIII to the Hollywood jungle, with stops along the way in a 19th century Essex asylum, an African war zone and a futuristic Brazilian city among other places. These are books that readers will want to get their hands on.

The nominees are Byatt for The Children’s Book, Coetzee for Summertime, Adam Foulds for The Quickening Maze, Sarah Hall for How to paint a dead man, Samantha Harvey for The Wilderness, James Lever for Me Cheeta, Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall, Simon Mawer for The Glass Room, Ed O’Loughlin for Not Untrue & Not Unkind, James Scudamore for Heliopolis, Toibin for Brooklyn, William Trevor for Love and Summer, and Waters for The Little Stranger.