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Lost Man Booker Prize honours books that fell through the cracks

Forty years after they were published, 22 books are now eligible for the Lost Man Booker Prize. This one-time literary award has been created to honour books published in 1970, the year when a change in the award’s eligibility dates meant many worthy titles were accidentally snubbed. These novels slipped through the cracks when the Booker Prize (as it was then known) “ceased to be awarded retrospectively and became, as it is today, a prize for the best novel in the year of publication.” From the announcement:

The Lost Man Booker Prize is the brainchild of Peter Straus, honorary archivist to the Booker Prize Foundation. He comments, “I noticed that when Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business was first published it carried encomiums from Saul Bellow and John Fowles, both of whom judged the 1971 Booker Prize. However, judges for 1971 said it had not been considered or submitted. This led to an investigation which concluded that a year had been excluded. I am delighted that, even in a Darwinian way, this year, with so many extraordinary novels, can now be covered by the Man Booker Prize.”

Although Fifth Business is still not included, since it was published in the U.K. in 1971, many other books will benefit from this realization. Authors longlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize include Canada’s own Margaret Laurence, who died in 1987, for The Fire Dwellers, and British author Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999 (but won the 1978 prize for The Sea, The Sea), for her 1970 novel A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Here is the full list:

• Brian Aldiss, The Hand Reared Boy
• H.E. Bates, A Little Of What You Fancy?
• Nina Bawden, The Birds On The Trees
• Melvyn Bragg, A Place In England
• Christy Brown, Down All The Days
• Len Deighton, Bomber
• J.G. Farrell, Troubles
• Elaine Feinstein, The Circle
• Shirley Hazzard, The Bay Of Noon
• Reginald Hill, A Clubbable Woman
• Susan Hill, I’m The King Of The Castle
• Francis King, A Domestic Animal
• Margaret Laurence, The Fire Dwellers
• David Lodge, Out Of The Shelter
• Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat
• Shiva Naipaul, Fireflies
• Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander
• Joe Orton, Head To Toe
• Mary Renault, Fire From Heaven
• Ruth Rendell, A Guilty Thing Surprised
• Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat
• Patrick White, The Vivisector

A shortlist of six novels will be announced by a panel of three judges in March, and the winner, ultimately announced in May, will be decided by a public vote via the Man Booker Prize website.