No Indian writer in 2010 Booker long-list

No Indian writer figures in this year’s long-list for the prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction, which is considered the leading literary award in the English-speaking world. The 2010 shortlist for the £50,000 prize will be announced on September 7 and the winner will be revealed on October 12 at a dinner at London’s Guildhall.

Indian or Indian-origin writers had been prominent contenders for the prize in recent years, but they did not figure in this year’s long-list for the coveted prize. Two recent winners of the prize were Aravinda Adiga (2008) and Kiran Desai (2006).

The long-list includes Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America; Emma Donoghue’s Room; Helen Dunmore’s The Betrayal; Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room; Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, Andrea Levy’s The Long Song; Tom McCarthy’s Book Titled C; David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet; Lisa Moore’s February; Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies; Rose Tremain’s Trespass, Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap; and Alan Warner’s The Stars in the Bright Sky.

The chair of judges, Andrew Motion, commented: “Here are 13 exceptional novels-books we have chosen for their intrinsic quality, without reference to the past work of their authors. Wide-ranging in their geography and their concern, they tell powerful stories which make the familiar strange and cover an enormous range of history and feeling.”