Kiran Desai in race for Booker Prize

New Delhi: Indian-born Kiran Desai is among the 19 authors in the long list for this year’s Man Booker Prize Award. Desai is in the list for her novel The Inheritance of Loss

Desai’s first book, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published in 1998 and won the Betty Trask Award. The Inheritance of Loss is set in a town in the foothills of Mount Kanchenjunga and follows the lives of a judge, his granddaughter and their cook.

Their books were selected from around 112 entries. Some 95 novels were submitted by publishers and 17 were called in by the panel of five judges—the poet and novelist Simon Armitage, the novelist Candia McWilliam, the critic Anthony Quinn and the actress Fiona Shaw, chaired by the biographer and academic Hermione Lee, said a report in Times Online.

The five judges took more than six hours to pick 19 authors—longer than that taken by previous judges, said a report in The Guardian.

Sarah Waters (The Night Watch), Peter Carey (Theft: A Love Story) and David Mitchell (Black Swan Green) are considered the strongest contenders for the £50,000 prize.

The Guardian said among longlisted contenders seen as having a fair chance of reaching next month's shortlist are the veteran writer and columnist Howard Jacobson for his novel Kalooki Nights.

Others are the South African Nadine Gordimer for Get a Life, Kate Grenville for The Secret River and Barry Unsworth, joint winner of the prize in 1992, for The Ruby in Her Navel.

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The chief judge, Hermione Lee, Oxford professor of English literature, told Guardian: “Judging the Man Booker Prize puts you through almost as many emotions as there are in the novels. We've tried to be careful and critical judges as well as being passionately involved. We have many regrets about some of the novels we've left off, and we could easily have had a longlist of about 30 books.

The 2006 shortlist will be announced on September 14 and the winner will be announced on October 10 at an awards ceremony in London.

The Booker Prize is one of the world's most prestigious literary prizes, and awarded each year for the best original full-length novel written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland in the English language.