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Congratulations go to Hamish Hamilton author John Updike, who is in the running for the first ever Man Booker International Prize.
The prize was announced in June 2004 and will recognize one writer for his or her achievement in fiction. Worth £60,000 to the winner, it 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.
The International Prize differs from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it highlights one writer's continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. Both prizes strive to recognise and reward literary excellence.
Professor John Carey, Chairman, commented that Updike was one of "eighteen authors who combine uniqueness and universality and remind us irresistibly of the joy of reading."
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.
Back in the middle falls, the devious path to illicit sex had grown shorter; the skids were greased. The scent upon Owen had ripened, the scent that told women he was in the market for what they had to offer. Not every man was. Some in Middle Falls were more interested in the next drink than in the next woman – Jock Putnam had been like that. Some, like Ed Mervine, put their passion into their work – the machinery, the payroll, the bottom line, the buccaneering of chancy enterprise in a revolutionary field. Certain husbands, of whom Henry Slade appeared to be one, were simply too dry, too stiff, too consumed by the drab business of earning a living, to play the love game. His bureaucratic post in Hartford, beneath the capitol dome that suggested the gold band at the top of a pencil, defined him and fulfilled him, so that what he brought to the social life of Middle Falls was a squeezed residue, compared to his wife's many involvements. Not that Henry was absent at weekend get-togethers; on the contrary, he was, with Vanessa, at every cocktail party and Heron Pond kiddy swim meet and informal picnic and formal benefit dance. He gave no sign, save a dry chuckle, of enjoying social life, or of not enjoying it. He smoked a pipe and nodded as he listened, seldom replying with more than a word or two, knocking out his pipe or pinching his lips together, with shifty sideways motions of his eyes before granting that word. He gave the impression of hesitating between brands or flavors of wisdom within his capacious available store; after over a decade of acquaintanceship Owen decided that Henry instead of wise was deadened and stupefied by years of meticulous drudgery in the service of Connecticut's most picayune regulations. He was a swarthy man, not tall; he walked as if a board were stiffening his back, thrusting his pipe and head forward while he plodded along, like a villager under a load of faggots. He was forty, which no longer seemed ancient to Owen, as Ian had seemed a few years ago.
Vanessa was a bit younger, and had a brusque, ageless quality, moving too purposefully to count the years. Her square, androgynous face, tanned by the sun in every season – for she was a keen skier as well as golfer, tennis player, and gardener – was exceptionally frontal; that is, where Owen thought of Henry as always in profile, preoccupied and heading off somewhere, Vanessa looked people in the eye, as if daring them to blink or smile in nervousness. With the same calm, faintly challenging authority she ruled the several town committees she served on, as well as her bridge circle and garden club. She was an impressive sight in her own garden, gloved and long-sleeved in protection from rose thorns, up to her trousered hips in delphiniums and phlox and well-staked peonies, a loosely woven straw hat throwing her watchful face into a shade speckled with sunlight. The flowers, it seemed to Owen, softened her, adding a feminine element missing in her confrontational gaze, blunt manner, and husky tenor voice. Amid the many couples the Mackenzies had come to know in Middle Falls, the Slades were not unique in that the man of the couple was rather laughable but the woman was not. The women had competence, mystery, and at least a hint of beauty. Vanessa was not beautiful – she hardly bothered with make-up, and her upper teeth, like his own, had come in crowded, pushing her eye teeth forward – but she was dignified and matter-of-fact. How matter-of-fact Owen did not realize until she came to sit beside him on an antique two-person sofa covered with striped satin – a love seat, they used to be called – on the fringe of an improvised dance floor at a party given by the couple, Dwight and Patricia Oglethorpe, who had bought the old Dunham place. Vanessa seated herself and said to him, keeping her voice low but distinct, "We ought to have lunch sometime."
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