Hilary Mantel (Photo credit: Henry Holt's Twitter)

Hilary Mantel has won the Man Booker Prize for fiction for Bring up the Bodies. The award was announced today during a dinner ceremony at London's medieval Guildhall.

"You wait 20 years for a Booker Prize and two come along at once," Ms. Mantel said, when accepting the award. Ms. Mantel won the prize for Wolf Hall in 2009. Bring up the Bodies is a sequel to Wolf Hall, which is something that the judges are hesitant to do, according to the  broadcasters we were listening to on the BBC Livestream. 

Ms. Mantel will receive £50,000 (which  is $80,500, according to the Internet), in addition to the £2,500 that went to all six shortlisted writers. Will Self had been a rumored favorite for his novel, Umbrella (which we are now pronouncing in a British accent in our head).

The judging panel includes Times Literary Supplement editor Peter Stothard and middle-class Manchester solicitor-turned heir to Downton Abbey, Matthew Crowley (the actor Dan Stevens).

"Eventually that will be to the detriment of literature. It will be bad for readers; as much as one would like to think that many bloggers opinions are as good as others. It just ain't so,” Sir Peter Stothard told the Independent, we imagine over a proper tea service. “People will be encouraged to buy and read books that are no good, the good will be overwhelmed, and we'll be worse off.”

Mr. Stothard (Sir Peter? We can’t seem to find our British stylebook anywhere) is a ‘blogger’ himself, but he writes 900 word essays about rereading Shakespeare for the TLS blog. And I think we can all agree that the TLS blog is in not the kind of blog Mr. Stothard is talking about.

Meanwhile, Mr. Stothard is hard at work whittling down the shortlist. The winner of the Man Booker Prizewill be announced on October 16.

"It was hard work. In a normal year, you might read 20 novels. So to read 145 in seven months is an unnatural act," he said. "But it's an important unnatural act because in a way literary criticism is an unnatural act. It is work, a technique, a skill."

Mr. Stothard’s criteria are a bit different than last year’s Man Booker chair Stella Rimington. Ms. Rimington said she wanted to choose books “people will read and enjoy.”

She was criticized for dumbing down the award. We don't imagine the same will be said about Mr. Stothard.

Book Riot is a book site for 18 to 34-year-olds. As this article points out, it does not seem to have made up its mind whether it's for adults who like to read, or for adults who hate to read (viz. "Charles Dickens is reigning king of Dead White Guys You Should Have Read in High School, But Probably Just Read the Cliff Notes or Possibly Watched the BBC Mini-series.") Even if it's being all bloggy about it, The Hairpin still rightly assumes that its readers love, say, George Eliot. [PaidContent]

The New York Times has discovered that Barnes & Noble pulled DC Comics from its shelves after the comic book publisher signed an exclusive deal to publish books digitally on Amazon. [NYT]

Another article about "Why writers should embrace Amazon's takeover of the publishing industry." Occupy the publishing industry!  [The New Republic]

Fans of St. Mark's Bookshop sing to save it. [DNAInfo]

An interview with Lauren Myracle, spurned ex-National Book Award finalist. [Vanity Fair]

Julian Barnes, winner of the Man Booker Prize yesterday, discussed the dubious value of the Booker Prize back in 1987. [London Review of Books]

Barnes.

After being named to the shortlist three times before, Julian Barnes has finally won this year's prize for his book The Sense of an Ending.

The Man Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award, has suffered this year from lots of fuss and discussions in the British press about whether the books named to its shortlist were elected for their "readability" or their literary merit. Mr. Barnes was the favorite to win among both gamblers and literary critics (perhaps because he has been nominated so many times in the past). Stella Rimington, who chaired the panel of judges, said that "The Sense of an Ending has the markings of a classic of English Literature. It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with each reading."The critical discussions culminated in a factional uprising of British literati who have banded together to establish a Man Booker antithesis called The Literature Prize. The new prize purports to actually uphold standards of good taste, a feat supposedly neglected by the Man Booker. We couldn't say: we haven't read any of the books.

Some nice things have happened as a result of the Man Booker, however. The prize is not open to American writers, but Esi Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues, the only book without a U.S. publisher prior to its inclusion on the list, will now be published in the U.S. by Picador, likely as a result of her having been shortlisted. The release date for Mr. Barnes's The Sense of an Ending was fast-tracked by its publisher, Knopf (vindicated by the decision, Knopf publicity director Paul Bogaards transmitted a simple "Booyah!" after the announcement). And, of course, everybody's books will sell better. Interviews with the shortlisted authors can be found here. A Paris Review interview with Mr. Barnes can be found here.

According to a report from The Bookseller about the new prize, the board of the new award thinks that the Man Booker "now priorities a notion of 'readability' over artistic achievement." In contrast, the new prize, which at the moment is just called The Literature Prize, "will offer readers a selection of novels that, in the view of these expert judges, are unsurpassed in their quality and ambition."

Negotiations about funding are ongoing and the organizers hope the first prize will be awarded 2012. The announcement comes just a few days after Stella Rimington, the chair of the judging panel for the Man Booker, told the Guardian that "t's pathetic that so-called literary critics are abusing my judges and me. They live in such an insular world they can't stand their domain being intruded upon."

Unlike the Man Booker, writers of any nationality whose books are published in Britain will be eligible for the award.

Edugyan.

Esi Edugyan's Man Booker shortlisted novel Half-Blood Blues is narrated by an African-American jazz musician from Baltimore. Through a mix of flashbacks and first-person narration, the story recounts the mysterious disappearance of a black German jazz musician – son of a French-African father and a German mother – against a backdrop of Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Paris. Ms. Edugyan is Canadian, and her book is a story of Americans in Europe, but her novel failed to interest U.S. publishers as a first draft.

Her agent in Toronto, Anne McDermid, said she shopped a first draft of the novel to “more than a few” American publishers 18 months ago, including HarperCollins, the American publisher that had first option to buy (Half-Blood Blues was published by Serpent’s Tail in Britain) but none of them bit. Ms. Edugyan was more fortunate in her native Canada, where the novel was published by Thomas Allen this month to positive reviews (even though, as the reviewer for Toronto’s Globe & Mail noted, “Canada exists far from the landscape of this novel.”)

American publishers proved willing to take a second look, however, after Ms. Edugyan’s novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Award, a British literary prize awarded to writers from the Commonwealth and Ireland. “It was when she was longlisted that we started a multiple submission,” Ms. McDermid told The Observer. “We had it out with many, many people in New York.” When the book was then both shortlisted for the Man Booker and named as a finalist for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize, a Canadian literary award, publishers suddenly proved eager to take a serious second look.

A deal to publish the book as a trade paperback with Picador was announced today. “I just got it last week and read it last weekend and fell in love with it completely,” said Frances Coady, the acquiring editor, who added that Ms. Edugyan had an “original and fresh voice.” Ms. Coady acquired the book in a pre-empt. “I just lucked out and managed to rush in there and get it,” she said.

“One of the things that influenced us was that the imprint committed to doing it very, very quickly,” said Ms. McDermid, saying that the book should be available in the U.S. by early next year and perhaps sooner. “Some of the bigger companies can’t move that fast.”

Barnes.

Following the release of the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize, Knopf announced it will be moving up the release date for Julian Barnes's shortlisted novel The Sense of an Ending. Mr. Barnes has been shortlisted three times before and is a favorite to win the prize. The book was originally scheduled for release in January 2012 but will now come out before the October 18 announcement of the winner.

Another shortlisted novel for the British literary award, the Canadian writer Esi Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues, has yet to secure a US publisher, but her agency told The Observer yesterday that they were very close to signing a deal.

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape - Random House in UK; coming out from Knopf in January 2012 in US)

Mr. Barnes is the elder statesman of this group and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times before (for Flaubert's Parrot, England, England and Arthur and George. He lives in London. His book tells "the story of one man coming to terms with the mutable past."

Carol Birch, Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books in UK; Doubleday in US)

Ms. Birch also lives in England. This is her tenth novel. It's about a man whose life changes after he is rescued from the jaws of an escaped circus tiger in London, after which he sets out on a ship to capture a komodo dragon for a wealthy collector. Then the crew is lost at sea. The New York Times review: "Probably the most interesting element of this novel is not its horrors, but its colorful milieu, the late-19th-century interest in naturalism."

Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers (Granta in UK; Ecco in US)

A Canadian who now lives in Portland, Oregon (so the US isn't totally absent after all) Mr. deWitt's The Sisters Brothers is a western about two gunslingers hired to kill a gold prospector. According to Publisher's Weekly, the gunslingers in this "genre-bending frontier saga that is exciting, funny, and, perhaps unexpectedly, moving" encounter "a witch, a bear, a dead Indian, a parlor of drunken floozies, and a gang of murderous fur trappers" on their trip. Mr. deWitt has won comparisons to Cormac McCarthy, Charles Portis and Frank Norris. The Los Angeles Times: "more poetic than realistic but as easy to slip into as the old HBO series Deadwood."

Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail in UK; does not yet have a publisher in the US! Ms. Edugyan's agency in Canada, Ann McDermid Associates: "we're very close to something.")

Ms. Edugyan's second novel, Half Blood Blues is about a black jazz musician and German citizen arrested by the Nazis in in 1940 and "never heard from again." Fifty years later, his old friends discover he's alive, in Poland. More people coming to terms with a mutable past.  Ms. Edugyan is also a Canadian. The Guardian says Ms. Edugyan " really can write" -- even if New York publishing only paid attention after she was nominated for the prize.

Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English (Bloomsbury in the UK; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the US)

Mr. Kelman's book has gotten lots of attention since it sold for a six-figure sum in the UK after a bidding war by British publishers in 2010. The Guardian described it as the story of "an 11-year-old Ghanaian immigrant caught up in gang warfare on a south London estate" and opined that while the book does "an admirable job of revealing the frightened teenage boys behind gang members' tough façades," it is also "too conscious of the gulf between its subjects and its inevitably middle-class readers to be truly convincing." Mr. Kelman lives in London.

A.D. Miller, Snowdrops (Atlantic in the UK; Doubleday in the US)

Mr. Miller, an Englishman who worked for the Economist in Russia, writes his first novel about how "a young Englishman’s moral compass is spun by the seductive opportunities revealed to him by a new Russia: a land of hedonism and desperation, corruption and kindness, magical dachas and debauched nightclubs." Magical dachas sound really fun, even if Publishers Weekly called the book "saggy."

Spot the difference.

Big Monday news in books and television:

The Man Booker Prize longlist of nominees, deciphered.

The common language of literature, charted.

Children's books illustrated by Andy Warhol.

Terry Gilliam is adapting Paul Auster's Mr. Vertigo.

A mega-preview of Downton Abbey's second season.

Today, Laura Miller argues in a Salon piece that the inferiority of the novels the two Philips are attacking is more due to their other deficiencies than simply their tenses.

Yes, young writers are prone to believing that techniques "calling attention to" the unreliability of storytelling itself are far more daring, innovative and interesting than they actually are. But like other carped-about trends (minimalism, incest as a plot point, short stories ending in an "epiphany," etc.), the present tense is only one among any number of crutches clung to by mediocre writers, usually because they've seen other, more talented writers use them to advantage. 

But to Pullman, who wrote the ever-popular His Dark Materials children's books, the present tense itself is enough to turn any novel, regardless of how decent it is, into nothing but an exercise in affectation and trend-stalking. "This wretched fad has been spreading more and more widely," he tells The Telegraph. "I can’t see the appeal at all."

This sentiment may be more than petty bickering for bickering's sake. The Observer transposed the first sentences of a few famous works from the past tense to the present, and they just didn't pack the same punch.

The Great Gatsby:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gives me some advice that I'm turning over in my mind ever since.

The Stranger:

Mother dies today.

A Tale of Two Cities:

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times...

Perhaps these British writers are on to something! Let's hope the Booker Prize doesn't go to a novel written in that gauche, terrible present tense. A win for the past tense would be a win for the English language.