List announced for best-ever Booker Prize

Britain’s Hilary Mantel, Canada’s Michael Ondaatje and American author George Saunders are among five contenders for the title of greatest-ever winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction. This special one-off award for the Man Booker Prize’s 50th anniversary celebrations will crown the best work of fiction from the last five decades of the prize.

All 51 previous winners were considered by a panel of five specially appointed judges, each of whom was asked to read the winning novels from one decade of the prize’s history.

Mantel’s Tudor saga “Wolf Hall,” Ondaatje’s multilayered romance “The English Patient” and Saunders’ Civil War-era symphony “Lincoln in the Bardo” are finalists for the Golden Man Booker Prize.

Also nominated are “In a Free State” by Trinidad-born Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul and “Moon Tiger” by Britain’s Penelope Lively. The list was announced Saturday.

A panel of judges selected one book from each decade since the prize was founded in 1969. A public vote will decide the ultimate winner, to be announced July 8.

The prize was originally open to British, Irish and Commonwealth writers. Americans have been eligible since 2014.

Associated Press