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Man Booker International Prize 2005

The Man Booker International Prize, announced in June 2004, will recognize one writer for his or her achievement in fiction.  Worth £60,000 to the winner, the prize will be awarded once every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language. An author can only win the award once.

The first winner of The Man Booker International Prize 2005 will be announced in June in London and the prize will be awarded at a dinner later that month.  The prize is sponsored by the Man Group, which also sponsors the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

The judging panel for the 2005 Man Booker International Prize is: Professor John Carey (Chair); writer, novelist and editor, Alberto Manguel; and writer and academic, Azar Nafisi.

AUTHORS NOMINATED (links to author page at MostlyFiction.com when available):

Margaret Atwood (Canada)
Saul Bellow (Canada)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Columbia)
Gunter Grass (Germany)
Ismail Kadaré (Albania) -WINNER!
Milan Kundera (Czech Republic)
Stanislaw Lem (Poland)
Doris Lessing (UK)
Ian McEwan (UK)
Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt)
Tomas Eloy Martinez (Argentina)
Kenzaburo Oe (Japan)
Cynthia Ozick (US)
Philip Roth (US)
Muriel Spark (UK)
Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)
John Updike (US)
A.B. Yehoshua (Israel)

The Winner, announced on June 2, 2005 is Albanian novelist Ismail Kadaré.

Kadaré, born in 1936 in the Albanian mountain town of Gjirokaster near the Greek border, is Albania's best-known poet and novelist. He has lived in France since 1990, following his decision to seek asylum stating that: "Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship."

From 1986, under the Communist regime, Kadaré's work was smuggled out of Albania by his French publisher, Éditions Fayard, and stored in safe keeping for later publication. Translations of his novels have since been published in more than forty countries.

His novels include (links to Amazon.com):

• My Century (1961)
• The General of the Dead Army (1963)
• Why These Mountains Brood (1964)
• The Wedding (1968)
• The Castle (1970)
• Chronicle in Stone (1971)
• The Great Winter (1977)
• The Three Arched Bridge (1978)
• Broken April (1978)
• Doruntine (1980)
• The File on H (1981)
• The Concert (1988)
• The Pyramid (1992)
• The Palace of Dreams (1996)
• Spring Flowers, Spring Frost (2000)
• The Life, Game, and Death of Lul Mazreku (2002)

For more information about the prize and the nominations, visit the official Man Booker International site.

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