John Banville Wins Man Booker

The results are in, and the 2005 Man Booker goes to John Banville and The Sea. Mark Sarvas will be thrilled, but apparently the judges’ tastes don’t synch up with those of ordinary literati: Banville ran a distant fifth (in a field of six) in the “People’s Prize” poll, which went to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Knopf’s American edition of The Sea won’t come out until next March, at which point it will have published fully half of this year’s shortlist. In addition to Never Let Me Go, which has been out for months, Knopf also has Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George on tap for early ’06. And their close cousins in the Bertelsmann family, Pantheon, will release Ali Smith’s The Accidental at roughly the same time.

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