New Zealander Eleanor Catton has won the 2013 Booker Prize making her the youngest winner of the prize ever, and her book The Luminaries, set in the 19th Century New Zealand Gold Rush, the longest at more than 800 pages. Chair of the judging panel, writer and critic Robert Macfarlane…
Crace bookie’s choice for Booker Prize winner
Jim Crace’s Harvest has firmed as Bookie’s favourite to take the Booker Prize announced later today and having now completed all six finalists I’m placing my $5 on him as well. If I was going for a Trifecta ( if indeed I was completely sure what a Trifecta actually was) I’d…
Booker Prize short list announced
Harvest, by early favourite Jim Crace tops the shortlist for the Booker Prize announced overnight in London. Also on the list are A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo, The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri and The Testament…
Review: Harvest by Jim Crace
The inhabitants of the small English village, so meager that it does not even have a name, are celebrating the end of the annual harvest. It is a rare moment of carefree pleasure for the families who eke a living growing crops and grazing their animals on the common land they have lived on “since Adam”.
But the arrival of a surveyor, taking stock and drawing maps of the land, creates a cloying atmosphere of anxiety and gossip. Then fire destroys the stable block and outbuildings belonging to the benign Master Kent, who owns the fields and effectively the village. A ragtag mob sets off following the thin ribbon of smoke rising from a lean-to on the edge of the common. The strangers make ready culprits. The two men ending up in to stocks, the enigmatic woman, shorn but free.
Crace’s Harvest, long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, is set in an unspecified year during
Booker Prize 2013 longlist announced
Women have dominated the Booker Prize long list taking out seven of the 13 slots. In an eclectic selection said by the judges to be the most diverse ever there was only a smattering of well-known authors. There was a fair international spread with four British authors, three Irish and representatives from Malaysia, Zimbabwe, New Zealand, India and Canada. The full long list is: