The Man Booker Prize, 1979-1980

Winner 1979:
Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

Shortlisted:
Confederates by Thomas Keneally
A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
Joseph by Julian Rathbone
Praxis by Fay Weldon

1979 Judges:
Lord Asa Briggs
Benny Green
Michael Ratcliffe
Hilary Spurling
Paul Theroux

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1980 Winner:
Rites of Passage by William Golding

Shortlisted:
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai
The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose by Alice Munro
No Country for Young Men by Julia O'Faolain
Pascali's Island by Barry Unsworth
A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

1980 Judges:
David Daiches
Ronald Blythe
Margaret Forster
Claire Tomalin
Brian Wenham

My catamite read me Earthly Powers. But that's all!

Nada -- I am obviously highly deficient in 20th c. British fiction.

I am reading E.P. right now. Beautifully written. Funny. Amazing characterizations. Even the verses he makes up for the fictional rivals of his fictional novelist are fun. Great book so far and I'd be really surprised if that changed. I won't be at all surprised if it ends up one of my best reads this year.

1980 was a great year for Brit lit. Rites of Passage is brilliant, and the shortlist was pretty good too. Pascali's Island wasn't bad, and A Month in the Country is one of the great overlooked gems of 20th century fiction. EP is of course a masterpiece.

5: I read A month in the country by turgenev - didn't realize there was another one!

Nothing on either of these lists. Boy. These threads are making me feel so illiterate.

>6 anna_in_pdx: These threads are making me feel so illiterate. Yeah, me too.

I own Offshore and want to read Earthly Powers. Sheesh, I'm pathetic.

Great threads these booker lists !

I'm halfway through Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop and loving it. Would never have come across it were it not for the Booker awards. I'll want to move on to Earthly Powers very shortly and have also my radar on J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country for my next bookshop rounds.

of course e.p. can be quite sad, too

Only A Bend in the River for me. I recall enjoying it, but not much else.

I've read Confederates, and although I am not a Civil War buff, at the time I read the book I found the descriptions of the lives of the soldiers during battle and times of quiet to be very compelling. I've also recently read Rites of Passage and Clear Light of Day, which I think is a much better book than her daughter's Inheritance of Loss.

Nada

It's been years, but I remember loving Earthly Powers. I've forgotten lots about it, and should probably give it another go, but one thing I've never forgotten is the first line of the book, which is blessedly included here on LT in the common knowledge section of Earthly Powers. To save anyone having to run over there to check it out, I've copied it and pasted it below:

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

It's so marvelous and over-the-top that it could almost be an entry in The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/).