Aussie chasing historic third victory in Booker prize

Peter Carey has been long-listed for his novel Theft: A Love Story.

Australian author Peter Carey is bidding to become the first person in the history of the Booker prize to win it three times after his novel Theft: A Love Story made it on to this year's long-list.

But the book will face strong competition from former winners Nadine Gordimer, the South African Nobel laureate, and Barry Unsworth.

And the hottest tip for success this year must be David Mitchell, 37, the technically audacious British author who was nominated with two out of his first three novels.

He is making a third attempt to win the prize, now known as the Man Booker and worth £50,000 ($150,000) and was immediately installed as the bookmakers' favourite with his new book, Black Swan Green.

It is an elegiac story of a 13-year-old boy in Worcestershire, the county where Mitchell grew up.

Graham Sharpe, a spokesman for bookmaker William Hill, said: "Mitchell richly deserved to win with Cloud Atlas [which lost to Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty in 2004] and his latest novel is another high-quality effort which will take a lot of beating."

William Hill has made Peter Carey, who won in 1988 with Oscar and Lucinda, and in 2001 with The True History of the Kelly Gang, second favourite at 6/1. Sarah Waters is 7/1 third favourite with her wartime story, The Night Watch.

Announcing the 19-strong long-list yesterday after 7 1/2 hours of debate, Hermione Lee, the chairwoman of this year's judges, said they had tried to be careful and critical in assessing the 112 entries.

"We have many regrets about some of the novels we've left off, and we could easily have had a long-list of about 30 books, but we're delighted with the variety, the originality, the drama and craft, the human interest and the strong voices in this long-list," she said.

"It's a list in which famous novelists rub shoulders with little-known newcomers. We hope people will leap at it for their late summer reading and make up their own short-list."

The judges include Independent critic Anthony Quinn, actress Fiona Shaw and poet Simon Armitage. There is one debut novelist in Hisham Matar with In the Country of Men, which is set in Colonel Gaddafi's Libya, where Matar spent part of his childhood.

Seven on the long-list are women, including Australian writer Kate Grenville with The Secret River. She is a previous winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, which was originally set up to counter a perceived male bias in prizes such as the Booker.

Other women on the list include Mary Lawson with The Other Side of the Bridge. Lawson is a distant relative of the Canadian writer L.M. Montgomery.

Many of the authors now live in countries other than those of their birth.

Naeem Murr lives in Chicago, M.J. Hyland lives in Melbourne and James Lasdun lives in upstate New York. All were born in London.

Only citizens of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland are eligible for the prize.

Jon McGregor, long-listed in 2002, gets another chance with So Many Ways to Begin, and Independent columnist Howard Jacobson is a 10/1 chance with Kalooki Nights.

Last year's winner was John Banville with The Sea.

Notable omissions this year include J. G. Ballard's forthcoming novel, Kingdom Come, although House of Meetings, the new title from Martin Amis, was thought not to be eligible as it is not a full-length novel.


BOOKER FAVOURITES

5-1: David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

6-1: Peter Carey, Theft: A Love Story

7-1: Sarah Waters, The Night Watch


- INDEPENDENT