News & Reviews

WORD: Banville takes Booker Prize for 'The Sea' on eve of first annual Quill Awards

John Banville’s novel The Sea (Picador) won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, beating out other shortlisted books by Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith, judges’ chairman John Sutherland announced. While Britain’s top literary prize brought its usual controversy, America’s newest book award came to a predictable close.

The Sea is a novel of loss, identity and remembrance and won the Booker Prize for its beautifully crafted prose. Banville, a former literary editor of The Irish Times, is the first Irish author to win in over a decade. Ireland’s Roddy Doyle won with Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha back in 1993.

Prize officials described Banville as "one of the great fictional stylists of our time." The Sea was published by Picador, which has now taken back-to-back Booker Prizes. The publisher also handled last year’s winner, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty.

In addition to winning the award’s £50,000 or roughly $88,000 prize, Banville’s book is guaranteed a huge increase in sales and recognition worldwide. The awards ceremony was televised live in the UK on BBC Two.

The Booker Prize often is surrounded by controversy, and Banville’s selection this year was no exception. Ian McEwan’s Saturday initially competed with The Sea for the Booker Prize after garnering strong reviews, but Banville reportedly shredded the work as "dismayingly bad" when reviewing it for The New York Review of Books.

Shortly after the Booker Award was hashed out before a live television audience in the UK, America’s newest book award came to a predictable close as television host Jon Stewart, J.K. Rowling and Bob Dylan bagged Quill Awards in their categories.

Stewart’s America: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction -- co-written by the Daily Show’s staff -- won best humor (Warner Books); Rowling’s latest Harry Potter installment (Illustrator) took book of the year and best children’s; and Dylan won best biography/memoir for Chronicles: Volume One (Simon & Schuster), Reed Business Information announced.

The Quill Award gives the public an opportunity to vote on nominees, who were selected by a panel of librarians and booksellers. Authors qualified for consideration after appearing on either the best-seller list at Barnes & Noble or in a review in Publishers Weekly, whose parent company was co-organizer of Quill along with NBC-TV.

The Quill Book Awards, which carries no cash value but like the Booker will help buoy the winning authors’ sales, are slated for broadcast on NBC October 22.  

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