Irish novelist John Banville was yesterday named among the 15 writers on the contenders' list for the Man Booker International Prize for 2007, announced in Toronto .
Worth £60,000 (€88,000) to the winner, this award is different from its sister prize the original Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it highlights a writer's creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage - instead of being for just one book alone.
The other contenders are Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey, Don DeLillo, Carlos Fuentes, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Harry Mulisch, Alice Munro , Michael Ondaatje, Amos Oz, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie and Michael Tournier. The winner will be announced in June.
Irish novelist Colm Tóibín is one of this year's three judges along with South African writer Nadine Gordimer and academic, author and critic Elaine Showalter. They have picked for their shortlist writers from 10 countries. Four are writers in translation.
Awarded every two years , the prize goes to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is available in English translation. It is the first time an Irish writer is on the judges' list for this international prize. John Banville, a former literary editor of The Irish Times, won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2005 with his novel The Sea.
Meanwhile, last night at the Chester Beatty library in Dublin Banville's recent crime novel Christine Fallswritten under the pseudonym Benjamin Black was named as one of the novels shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.
The other shortlisted novelists are: Roddy Doyle for Paula Spencer; Pat McCabe for Winterwood;Claire Kilroy for Tenderwireand Gerard Donovan for Julius Winsome. The winner of this award will be announced at the opening of Writers' Week in Listowel on May 30th .