TORONTO - An international light shone on Canada's literary community Thursday when an esteemed panel of judges announced that three Canuck authors -- Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje -- are among 15 contenders for the 2007 Man Booker International Prize, which honours fiction writers for their entire body of work.
Princeton University professor Elaine Showalter, chair of the international judging panel, said at a news conference at the University of Toronto that "Canada should take some pride in producing such an extraordinary set of contemporary writers.''
But she and the other two judges stressed that they tried not to pay attention to the nationality of the writers when drafting the short list for the prize, which is handed out every two years and is worth C$135,000.
"We can't emphasize enough that we were not concerned with the aspect of the prize going to a particular nation or nationality at all and it's purely coincidental that there are these (three) Canadian writers,'' said panel judge Nadine Gordimer, a South African novelist who won the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Irish author and fellow judge Colm Toibin added it was the differences between the Canadian authors and "the distinctive nature of what they did'' that grabbed the panel's attention.
"I think it's wonderful that you can't find in the three of them what you could call a national theme which you could call Canadian which appears in their work,'' he said at Massey College.
"It's quite the opposite in fact, which is what's so interesting.''
Atwood, of course, is known for novels including "The Handmaid's Tale,'' "The Edible Woman'' and "The Robber Bride'' while Munro is one of the country's pre-eminent short story writers. Ondaatje is a poet as well as the author of "The English Patient'' and "Anil's Ghost.'' He has a new novel due out this month.
The Canadians are in good company. Rounding out the short list is John Banville (Ireland), Peter Carey (Australia), Don DeLillo and Philip Roth (U.S.), Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie (Great Britain), Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Harry Mulisch (the Netherlands), Amos Oz (Israel) and Michel Tournier (France).
The prize is awarded to a living writer who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.
There is also a separate translator's prize, worth about C$33,000.
Albanian writer Ismail Kadare won the inaugural prize in 2005. This year's winner will be announced in early summer in London and is to receive the prize at an awards ceremony in Oxford, England at the end of June.
The winner is chosen at the discretion of the judging panel, and there are no submissions from publishers.
The current panel "read a great deal'' over the past year and was looking for the quality of the writing first, as well as the contribution to the development of fiction, said Showalter.
It was also important that a writer's works showed development in relation to the societal and political changes around that writer, said Gordimer.
The prize is sponsored by the London-based financial services firm Man Group, which also sponsors the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, which is worth about C$100,000. That prize is awarded for a single work, and is open only to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth of former British colonies.
A single work may not be considered for both the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker International Prize.
And an author can only win the Man Booker International award once.
