The short list for the new International Booker Prize has just been announced. John Carey, chairman of judges, discusses the prize and how he hopes it will evolve (Real Audio :: first item in the show) .

But, can Stanislaw Lem really win? Will it become a rival to the Nobel Prize for Literature? And do these writers really need another prize?
posted by johnny novak on Feb 22, 2005 - 23 comments

Canadian novelist Yann Martel, whose novel, Life of Pi (excerpt, review), won the 2002 Booker Prize, has been accused of plagiarizing Brazilian novelist Moacyr Scilar's 1981 novella, Max and the Cats, which shares a similar premise. Martel freely admits that the premise of Scilar's work, which he discovered via a half-remembered (and scathing) critique, inspired Life of Pi, but he has not read it. The issue is whether a premise is intellectual property or whether such ideas are recycled all the time. While this would ordinarily be a literary tempest, Canada and Brazil have had a shaky relationship over trade in recent years; this may not help the situation.
posted by mcwetboy on Nov 7, 2002 - 29 comments

The brouhaha that erupted in Britain last month when it was learned that the prestigious Booker Prize might be opened to American writers by 2004, displays a British inferiority complex and underscores the remarkable persistence of preconceptions that Britain and the United States hold about each other. But it's about ideas and styles and even language being swapped and appropriated across the globe. It's about artists picking from a smorgasbord of techniques and influences to try to get a handle on an increasingly fragmented and cacophonous reality, and in doing so creating a new wave of writing that is richer for its multicultural mingling of styles and voices, its voracious mixing of the high and low, the cerebral and street-smart, the old and the new. Just like in MeFi.
posted by semmi on Jun 14, 2002 - 17 comments

Winner announced - official.
posted by Mocata on Nov 8, 2000 - 6 comments