The Man Booker Prize for writers in the Commonwealth has expanded this year and will award an International Prize for a body of work from writers from any country.

The nominees are:

Margaret Atwood
Saul Bellow
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gunter Grass
Ismail Kadare
Milan Kundera
Stanislaw Lem
Doris Lessing
Ian McEwan
Naguib Mahfouz
Tomas Eloy Martinez
Kenzaburo Oe
Cynthia Ozick
Philip Roth
Muriel Spark
Antonio Tabucchi
John Updike
A.B. Yehoshua

It should go to a writer who has NOT already won the Nobel Prize (which is really the highest prize in literature). That eliminates Bellow, García Márquez, Grass, Mahfouz, and Oe. My choices would be Atwood, Kundera, Martinez, Roth, Spark, or Yehoshua. I don't believe Ozick is in the same league with the rest of these authors. Updike writes too much; Tabucchi is good but a minor author. And what about Salman Rushdie? Wilson Harris? Luisa Valenzuela? Assia Djébar? Haruki Murakami? Ngugi wa Thiongo? Javier Marías? J.M. Coetzee???

[ February 18, 2005, 10:03 PM: Message edited by: fantomas ]