She squeaked by in a three-to-two vote among the judges, but the heavily-favored Mantel prevailed last night and took the Booker Prize. Chair of the judges James Naughtie said, “It wasn’t a unanimous decision. These things seldom are, but it was a decision with which we were all content. There was no blood on the carpet. We parted good friends.”
It’s the first-ever Booker win for the UK’s Fourth Estate, and Holt is set to release the US edition next Tuesday. At the Huffington Post, Amy Hertz praises and congratulates her mentor and Mantel’s US editor, Jack Macrae. Mantel, who spent five years working on Wolf Hall, is already at work on a sequel, THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT.
In other prize news, after the Swedish Academy insulted American authors prior to the awarding of last year’s literature prize, the new head of the just Peter Englund has gone the opposite direction, saying it “is a problem” that nine of the last 10 winners have been European and suggesting that the prize has become too “Eurocentric.”
Prize site
HuffPo
AP on Nobel