The Irish writer Colm Toibin has been short-listed for this year's Booker Prize for his fourth novel, The Blackwater Lightship. It is the first time Toibin has been short-listed for the £20,000 award, although he was widely tipped in 1992 for The Heather Blazing.
The other candidates are Michael Frayn for Headlong; Andrew O'Hagan for Our Fathers; Anita Desai for Fasting, Feasting; Ahdaf Soueif for The Map of Love; and J.M. Coetzee for Disgrace.
Toibin's stiffest challenge comes from the South African, J.M. Coetzee, who won the prize in 1983 and whose new novel Disgrace is probably the best novel published in English this year. The winner will be announced on October 25th.
Toibin was in London visiting friends when he heard the news yesterday. Asked if the novel was more private than his usual works, he said it was "a much more modest book" about family relations set in the world he knows best, Co Wexford.
Born in Wexford in 1955, Toibin entered journalism on leaving university. He was features editor of In Dublin, and later editor of the current affairs magazine Magill. His fiction debut, The South (1990), immediately established him as a writer with a soft, lyric voice and an ability to explore inner turmoil without hysterics.
Now in its 31st year, the Booker remains the most prestigious and contentious of literary awards. The previous Irish winner was Roddy Doyle, for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha in 1993.
