Mantel aiming for second Booker win

An author who was turned down by traditional publishers has been pitted against previous winner Hilary Mantel for this year’s Man Booker Prize.

Mantel, 60, won the £50,000 prize in 2009 for 'Wolf Hall', her first book in her fictional trilogy on Thomas Cromwell.

If she scoops the title again with her follow-up, 'Bring Up The Bodies', she will become the first British writer to win the Man Booker Prize for Fiction twice.

'Swimming Home' by Deborah Levy, a novel which was originally rejected by traditional publishers, has also been shortlisted.

Set on the French Riviera over a single week, it hit the shelves after being published by a small company which uses a subscription method to bring out many of its books.

Novelist and journalist Will Self is shortlisted for the first time for the long-running prize for 'Umbrella', a novel which has no chapters and few paragraph breaks, and which judges described as both “moving and draining”.

“Those who stick with it will find it much less difficult than it first seems,” they said of the book, which is set across an entire century.

Two of the books on the list are debut novels – 53-year-old Indian performance poet, songwriter and guitarist Jeet Thayil’s 'Narcopolis' and Manchester-born Alison Moore’s 'The Lighthouse'.

'Narcopolis', which judges praised for its “perfume prose”, is set in the Bombay of the 1970s.

'The Lighthouse' is the story of a middle-aged, recently separated man, who crosses the Channel by ferry after the failure of his marriage.

The sixth book is 'The Garden Of Evening Mists' by Tan Twan Eng, about the survivor of a Second World War Japanese prison camp. It is one of three books on the shortlist from small, independent publishers.

Dan Stevens, who plays Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey and is one of the judges, used an e-book reader to plough through some of the 145 titles on the longlist while filming the drama, joking that the device was “easier to secrete into a white tie”.

Bookmaker Ladbrokes made Mantel, followed by Self, favourite to win the prize.

Judges said that Mantel had shown “even greater mastery of method, powerful realism, and the separation of past and present and the vivid depiction of English character and landscape” in her latest work.

The winner, who will benefit from a huge surge in sales, will be unveiled at a ceremony in London’s Guildhall on Tuesday October 16.

Last year’s winner, 'The Sense Of An Ending' by Julian Barnes, has sold more than 300,000 print editions in the UK.

In 2011 the judges, chaired by former MI5 chief Stella Rimington, were accused by some of dumbing down the prize, and omitting big names.