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Globe: Toronto to host Booker (Prize) judges

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From the Globe:

Toronto to host Booker Prize judges
JAMES ADAMS

The Man Booker International Prize, one of the world's most valuable and prestigious literary honours, is coming to Toronto next year.

The three judges for the £60,000 fiction prize are to stay at Massey College at the University of Toronto for one week in mid-April, during which time they're expected to prepare and announce a short list of 15 contenders. The winner will be named in early June in Britain.

John Fraser, master of Massey College, confirmed the visit yesterday, saying he was approached by the award's organizers in March to play host to the adjudication process, which occurs every two years.

"We have a bookish history," he said, referring first and foremost to Robertson Davies, who was the multidisciplinary college's founding master in 1963 and whose novels Fifth Business, World of Wonders and What's Bred in the Bone, among others, won him an international following. Mr. Davies died in 1995.

Moreover, Mr. Fraser said, "they believe Massey is the All Souls of Canada" -- an allusion to the almost 600-year-old multidisciplinary Oxford college whose fellows have included the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, T. E. Lawrence and economist Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate.

Prize rules require the judges meet in a non-U.K. location to assemble a list of contenders. In February of 2005 they met at Georgetown University, Washington.

The adjudication panel for 2007 is a who's who of international heavyweights, with pioneering U.S. feminist critic Elaine Showalter chairing the deliberations of South Africa's Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991, and Irish novelist Colm Toibin, who this week snared the world's richest literary prize for a single work of fiction, the €100,000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, for his 2004 novel The Master.

An author can win the Man Booker International Prize only once, and it is for a body of work. Created as a complement to the Man Booker Prize that was established in the late 1960s to honour Commonwealth fiction authors, the biennial international award is given to a living writer of any nationality who has some or all of his/her work available in English. The winning writer, in turn, is asked to choose a translator or translators to receive an additional prize of £15,000.

Last year, the inaugural award, whose judges included Argentine-Canadian critic, translator and editor Alberto Manguel, went to Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare at a ceremony in Edinburgh.

He was chosen from a list of 18 contenders that included Margaret Atwood.

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