British author Andrew Miller and Indian novelist Kiran Desai are the bookmakers’ favorites to win this year’s prestigious Booker Prize for fiction, with the award ceremony scheduled in London on Monday.
Both writers are among six finalists vying for the coveted literary prize, which carries a £50,000 ($66,000) reward and often gives a significant boost to book sales and author recognition. This year’s winner was chosen from 153 submitted novels by a judging panel that includes Irish writer Roddy Doyle and actress Sarah Jessica Parker.
Bookmaker William Hill has listed Miller, 64, as the front-runner with 15-8 odds for his novel The Land in Winter, a story of love and secrets between two couples in rural England during the harsh winter of 1962-63. Miller was previously a Booker finalist in 2001 for Oxygen.
Desai, 54, follows closely with 2-1 odds for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, her first novel in nearly two decades. The nearly 700-page book follows two young Indians navigating life in the United States around the turn of the millennium. Desai won the Booker Prize in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss, and a second win would make her the fifth author to claim the award twice, joining J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, and Hilary Mantel.
Other contenders include Hungarian-British author David Szalay’s Flesh, Susan Choi’s family saga Flashlight, Katie Kitamura’s exploration of acting and identity in Audition, and Ben Markovits’ midlife-crisis road trip novel The Rest of Our Lives.
Roddy Doyle, a Booker laureate himself in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, praised all six books for addressing major social themes, including migration and class, in a “brilliantly human” way.
Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize has a long history of transforming writers’ careers, with past winners including Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, and Samantha Harvey, who won the 2024 prize for Orbital. Originally limited to authors from the U.K., Ireland, and the Commonwealth, the prize opened to U.S. writers in 2014. This year’s shortlist includes three American authors—Choi, Kitamura, and Markovits—and Desai, who has long resided in New York.
Source: AP