Hilary Mantel is the “hottest favourite ever” to win the Man Booker Prize for her historical novel Wolf Hall, even
though Simon Mawer has made a late burst.
Mantel has led the pack since the shortlist was announced a month ago, but is now the first-ever odds-on favourite, with Labrokes taking bets for her to win at 8/13 and William Hill at 10/11.
However, the bookies’ favourite has not picked up the coveted prize in seven years, when Yann Martell’s Life of Pi picked up the 2002 prize. JM Coetzee – also in the running this year – had been the favourite in 1999 for his winning novel Disgrace.
Simon Mawer has seen his book, The Glass Room, rise from 14/1 outsider to the second favourite at 7/2 at William Hill, but remains at 6/1 odds at Ladbrokes, where Coetzee’s Summertime and Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger tie in second place at odds of 5/1.
Nick Weinberg, spokesman for Ladbrokes, said more than 80% of all wagers had gone for Mantel. “There’s only one name on literary punters’ lips. It will be a huge surprise if she fails to secure the prize.”
But Graham Sharpe, William Hill spokesman, was a little more circumspect. Despite seeing a similar skew in betting – with Mantel taking more than 75% of the money – he highlighted the historic “curse of the favourite hitch”.
“[This] has seen several strongly fancied contenders like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Ian McEwen’s Atonement fall by the wayside in recent years,” he said.
“The last two winners – Aravand Adiga’s The White Tiger and Anne Enright’s The Gathering were both the complete outsiders, so for bookmakers the Booker has been very profitable for the last decade – and long may that continue.”
Shortlist Odds at William Hill
Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall – 10/11
Simon Mawer The Glass Room 7/2
J M Coetzee Summertime – 6/1
Sarah Waters The Little Stranger – 6/1
A S Byatt The Children’s Book – 8/1
Adam Foulds The Quickening Maze – 12/1
Shortlist Odds at Ladbrokes
Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall - 8/13
J M Coetzee Summertime – 5/1
Sarah Waters The Little Stranger – The Glass Room 6/1
A S Byatt The Children’s Book – 8/1
Adam Foulds The Quickening Maze – 10/1
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Posted at The Bookseller
October 7th, 2009 at 12:39 PM
From The Bookseller.com – posted today, the 7th of October 2009
Hilary Mantel has won 2009′s Man Booker Prize for her novel Wolf Hall. It was “not a unanimous decision”, head judge James Naughtie admitted last night, “but we were all content with the decision”. He added: “What we wanted to avoid at all costs was some kind of compromise.” The judges were split 3-2 between Mantel’s Wolf Hall and another book, which he declined to name.
But the media has widely backed the decision. “Rarely has the Booker Prize got it so gloriously, marvellously right as this year,” the Times enthused this morning. In her account of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power from blacksmith’s son to the righthand man of Henry VIII, Mantel has changed “that hoary old genre [historical fiction] for ever and redrawn its contours”.
At the Independent, Boyd Tonkin said the judges had “rewarded a genuinely outstanding novel”. He added: “If Wolf Hall achieves the near-impossible task of rescuing the Tudor court saga from cliché and melodrama, it also slots neatly into a body of work that looks shrewdly behind the robes and the words of the mighty.
On picking up the £50,000 award at the ceremony at London’s Guildhall, the author said she was “happily flying through the air”.
The win will come as no surprise to the bookies, who had Mantel leading the pack since the shortlist was announced a month ago. The Bookseller reported that Mantel had become the first ever odds-on favourite in the race to win the Man Booker prize: Ladbroke’s was offering odds of 8/13, while at William Hill she was placed at 10/11. The last time the favourite won was 2002, when Yann Martell’s Life of Pi (Canongate) took home the prize.
This is the first time Fourth Estate has been a Booker-winning publisher.
Naughtie described Wolf Hall as “a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century” and commended its “vast narrative sweep that gleams on every page with luminous and mesmerising detail”.
Mantel has previously won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for Fludd, the Sunday Express Book of the Year award for A Place of Greater Safety and the Hawthornden Prize for An Experiment of Love.