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The Man Booker Prize 2014

The 2014 Man Booker Prize has been won by Australian author Richard Flanagan. His wartime novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North took the coveted £50,000 award. Also shortlisted were Joshua Ferris, Karen Joy Fowler, Howard Jacobson, Neel Mukherjee and Ali Smith. Newsnight culture correspondent Stephen Smith spoke to Flanagan and the other prize nominees.

On the 2014 shortlist

  • J - Howard Jacobson

    Set in a future Britain, Howard Jacobson’s ‘J’ has already been compared to some of the all-time great works of dystopian fiction - George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’. The award-winning writer and broadcaster is already a Man Booker prize winner for his 2010 novel The Finkler Question.

  • How to be Both - Ali Smith

    Ali Smith's novel has caused a stir with its experimental approach. It’s a book of two parts. Two tales of love and injustice - one about a modern-day teenager, the other a 15th Century artist. The publisher released two versions of the novel, with the same stories arranged in a different order. Smith has been on the Booker shortlist twice before for The Accidental in 2005 and Hotel World in 2001.

  • The Lives of Others - Neel Mukherjee

    Neel Mukherjee’s second novel follows the fortunes of a middle-class family living in 1960s Calcutta, as India is rocked by revolutionary activity. Domestic upheaval mirrors social unrest in his highly ambitious book. Mukherjee was born in Calcutta in 1970. His debut novel A Life Apart won India’s Crossword Book Award and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award.

  • We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler

    Karen Joy Fowler has received wide acclaim for a novel that is intelligent, funny and heartbreaking. It is a story of family love about Rosemary - an only child whose brother and unique sister vanished from her life. American Fowler has written six novels, and is best known for The Jane Austen Book Club - which spent 13 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list

  • The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

    Richard Flanagan’s powerful love story unfolds over half a century between a doctor and his uncle’s wife. The tale was inspired by the Australian PoWs forced to build the Burma Railway in World War 2 – which the author's own father survived. Flanagan has won numerous awards, including the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Gould's Book of Fish.

  • To Rise Again at a Decent Hour - Joshua Ferris

    The third novel from Joshua Ferris has been praised as "the Catch-22 of dentistry" by Stephen King. The dark comedy follows a New York dentist, obsessed by religion and technology, who discovers he is being impersonated online. Ferris’s acclaimed first book Then We Came to the End was a finalist for America’s 2007 National Book Award.

About the 2014 award

The 2104 award is the first to feature US authors following a change in the rules at the end of 2013. The prize is now open to writers from beyond the UK and Commonwealth. Each shortlisted author receives £2500, with a £50,000 cheque for the winner. The Booker Prize was first awarded in 1969.

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